Arguments about critical race theory (CRT)

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See also: Critical race theory and Trends in curriculum development

What is critical race theory (CRT)?
Critical race theory (CRT) is a set of ideas, theories, and principles that can influence the understanding of race and racism. These include the idea that racism is embedded in legal and social systems. The term can also refer to activism based on this framework or specific conclusions, opinions, or policies attributed to CRT. Definitions and interpretations of CRT vary.

This page presents an overview of the main areas of inquiry and disagreement related to the history, theory, and practice of critical race theory (CRT).

• What is critical race theory and what isn't it?

  • Opponents mischaracterize critical race theory
  • Critical race theory is political—it’s not just an ivory tower legal theory
  • Critical race theory is intellectually rooted in Marxism
• If critical race theory is wrong or unnecessary, then why?

  • Critical race theory is divisive
  • Critical race theory contradicts American principles of equality and liberalism
  • Critical race theory is too revolutionary
  • Critical race theory is structurally, theoretically, and historically flawed
• If critical race theory is right or necessary, then why?

  • Critical race theory is unifying
  • Critical race theory is antiracist
  • Public schools are systemically racist, and critical race theory can help reduce systemic racism
• CRT should not be taught as part of K-12 curricula

  • Critical race theory has an activist component and its assumptions and framework influence school curriculum
  • Critical race theory's influence in schools harms students
  • Critical race theory and its assumptions affect school curricula and are taught to students as facts
• CRT should be taught in K-12 schools and institutions of higher education

  • The assumptions of CRT can guide better outcomes in schools
  • Restricting teaching on topics of race and racism negatively affects students and school
  • Teachers should primarily decide what is taught in classrooms*

What is critical race theory and what isn't it?

Argument: Opponents mischaracterize critical race theory

This argument contends that there is disagreement over what CRT is and what it means to teach it in schools. Proponents of CRT state that anti-CRT rhetoric misconstrues the theory to represent a wide range of topics regarding race and racism.

Claim: Anti-critical race theory legislation and arguments target conversations about systemic racism

This claim suggests that anti-CRT arguments are not about the theory itself, but are more broadly about topics related to systemic racism, discrimination, privilege, and oppression.

• Rashawn Ray and Alexandra Gibbons with The Brookings Institute argued, “To better understand how widespread these efforts are to ban critical race theory from U.S. classrooms, we did an assessment of anti-CRT state legislation. Here’s what we found:
  • Nine states (Idaho, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Arizona, and North Dakota) have passed legislation. Arizona’s legislation was overturned in November by the Arizona Supreme Court.
  • None of the state bills that have passed even actually mention the words ‘critical race theory’ explicitly, with the exception of Idaho and North Dakota.
  • The legislations mostly ban the discussion, training, and/or orientation that the U.S. is inherently racist as well as any discussions about conscious and unconscious bias, privilege, discrimination, and oppression. These parameters also extend beyond race to include gender lectures and discussions.”

• Reporter Phil McCausland contended, “Teachers nationwide said K-12 schools are not requiring or pushing them to teach critical race theory, and most said they were opposed to adding the academic approach to their course instruction, according to a survey obtained by NBC News. Despite a roiling culture war that has blown up at school board meetings and led to new legislation in statehouses across the country, the responses from more than 1,100 teachers across the country to a survey conducted by the Association of American Educators, a nonpartisan professional group for educators, appeared to suggest that the panicked dialogue on critical race theory made by lawmakers and the media does not reflect the reality of American classrooms. ‘We’re saying, ‘What is the fuss about?’’ said Lynn Daniel, a ninth-grade English teacher in the Phoenix area. ‘We don’t get it. This objection is being pushed upon us, and it’s not even happening in our classes. I don’t understand it.’”

• Ray and Gibbons continued, “To understand why CRT has become such a flash point in the culture, it is important to understand what it is and what it is not. Opponents fear that CRT admonishes all white people for being oppressors while classifying all Black people as hopelessly oppressed victims. These fears have spurred school boards and state legislatures from Tennessee to Idaho to ban teachings about racism in classrooms. However, there is a fundamental problem: these narratives about CRT are gross exaggerations of the theoretical framework. The broad brush that is being applied to CRT is puzzling to academics, including some of the scholars who coined and advanced the framework. CRT does not attribute racism to white people as individuals or even to entire groups of people. Simply put, critical race theory states that U.S. social institutions (e.g., the criminal justice system, education system, labor market, housing market, and healthcare system) are laced with racism embedded in laws, regulations, rules, and procedures that lead to differential outcomes by race. Sociologists and other scholars have long noted that racism can exist without racists. However, many Americans are not able to separate their individual identity as an American from the social institutions that govern us—these people perceive themselves as the system. Consequently, they interpret calling social institutions racist as calling them racist personally. It speaks to how normative racial ideology is to American identity that some people just cannot separate the two. There are also people who may recognize America’s racist past but have bought into the false narrative that the U.S. is now an equitable democracy. They are simply unwilling to remove the blind spot obscuring the fact that America is still not great for everyone.”

Claim: Anti-critical race theory arguments are based on a made-up definition of critical race theory

This claim suggests that the definition of CRT used by opponents is not an accurate definition of the theory.

• Ibram X. Kendi argued, “Instead, the attacks on critical race theory are based on made-up definitions and descriptors.”

• Nathan J. Robinson contended, “Instead, ‘critical race theory’ has become an umbrella term that should be understood to mean something like ‘All That Identity Politics Stuff I Don’t Like.’ It incorporates the New York Times’ 1619 Project, the writings of Robin DiAngelo, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Ibram X. Kendi, the concept of microaggressions, ‘white privilege,’ and Black Lives Matter. Many on the right think there’s a conspiracy by leftists to weaponize accusations of racism in order to justify radical changes to the social order, and critical race theory is a convenient brand for the thing they detest.”

• Professors Daniel Kreiss, Alice Marwick, and Francesca Bolla Tripodi argued, “The recent election of Glenn Youngkin as the next governor of Virginia based on his anti–critical race theory platform is the latest episode in a longstanding conservative disinformation campaign of falsehoods, half-truths and exaggerations designed to create, mobilize and exploit anxiety around white status to secure political power. The problem is, these lies work, and what it shows is that Democrats have a lot of work to do if they want to come up with a successful counter message. Conservatives have spent close to a century galvanizing white voters around the ‘dangerous’ idea of racial equality. When such disingenuous rhetoric turns into reality, the end result is criminalizing educational programs that promote racial equality. Youngkin, who pledged to ‘ban critical race theory on Day One,’ frequently repeated this promise at his ‘Parents Matter’ rallies across the state in the final months of the campaign. But in his campaigning, he and others misrepresented what critical race theory (CRT) actually is: a specialized intellectual field established in the 1980s by legal scholars Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda and Stephanie Phillips that emphasizes the unique historical role that legal systems play in upholding and producing racial inequalities in the United States.”

• Professor Jonathan Zimmerman argued, “This educational topic has become hyper-partisan: If you believe some Republicans, CRT is a massive educational stealth crusade to indict white Americans for racism of the past and present. To my fellow Democrats, meanwhile, the CRT controversy is simply a bogeyman cooked up by GOP. Nobody is teaching anyone to hate on whites; instead, Democrats say, we just want a true account of race in American history. But reasonable people disagree about that history, which is the big truth that neither side wants to admit. What most of the combatants in the war over CRT really want is to inscribe their version of America in our public schools. And that does an injustice to our students, who should be encouraged to debate different stories about the nation so they can narrate it on their own.”

Argument: Critical race theory is political—it’s not just an ivory tower legal theory

This argument posits that CRT is not just an academic or legal theory. Proponents of this argument hold that the assumptions of CRT affect law, politics, and K-12 education in practical ways.

Claim: Critical race theory is a tool of political power

This claim suggests CRT is a political tool that politicizes law and education.

• Christopher Rufo contended, “No longer simply an academic matter, critical race theory has become a tool of political power. To borrow a phrase from the Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci, it is fast achieving ‘cultural hegemony’ in America’s public institutions. More and more, it is driving the vast machinery of the state and society. If we want to succeed in opposing it, we must address it politically at every level.”

• Douglas E. Litowitz posited, “Traditionally, law review articles have attempted to explain what the law is or should be on a particular subject by expounding theory, reviewing applicable precedents, or examining legislative histories. By eschewing traditional legal scholarship in favor of an avowedly politicized stance, critical race theorists hope to engage in a program of ‘challenging racial orthodoxy, shaking up the legal academy, questioning comfortable liberal premises, and leading the search for new ways of thinking about our nation's most intractable, and insoluble, problem- race.’ No one should expect the traditional trappings of legal scholarship from CRT, and indeed CRT questions the very standards of the scholarship that hold sway in legal academia.”

Argument: Critical race theory is intellectually rooted in Marxism

This view, argued by some proponents and opponents of CRT, argues that CRT is Marxist in its structure and underlying philosophy. Proponents of this view argue that CRT substitutes the Marxist analysis of social problems through the lens of class conflict with a lens of racial conflict.

• Christopher Rufo argued, “In contrast to equality, equity as defined and promoted by critical race theorists is little more than reformulated Marxism. In the name of equity, UCLA Law Professor and critical race theorist Cheryl Harris has proposed suspending private property rights, seizing land and wealth and redistributing them along racial lines. Critical race guru Ibram X. Kendi, who directs the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, has proposed the creation of a federal Department of Antiracism. This department would be independent of (i.e., unaccountable to) the elected branches of government, and would have the power to nullify, veto, or abolish any law at any level of government and curtail the speech of political leaders and others who are deemed insufficiently ‘antiracist.’ One practical result of the creation of such a department would be the overthrow of capitalism, since according to Kendi, ‘In order to truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist.’ In other words, identity is the means and Marxism is the end.”

• Rufo continued, “In explaining critical race theory, it helps to begin with a brief history of Marxism. Originally, the Marxist Left built its political program on the theory of class conflict. Marx believed that the primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance, according to Marx, was revolution: the workers would eventually gain consciousness of their plight, seize the means of production, overthrow the capitalist class, and usher in a new socialist society. … But rather than abandon their Leftist political project, Marxist scholars in the West simply adapted their revolutionary theory to the social and racial unrest of the 1960s. Abandoning Marx’s economic dialectic of capitalists and workers, they substituted race for class and sought to create a revolutionary coalition of the dispossessed based on racial and ethnic categories.”

• Rufo continued, “Critical race theory is an academic discipline, formulated in the 1990s, built on the intellectual framework of identity-based Marxism. Relegated for many years to universities and obscure academic journals, over the past decade it has increasingly become the default ideology in our public institutions. It has been injected into government agencies, public school systems, teacher training programs, and corporate human resources departments in the form of diversity training programs, human resources modules, public policy frameworks, and school curricula.”

• Mackubin Owens argued, “CRT can be traced to Karl Marx and his epigones, manifesting itself first as ‘critical theory,’ a Marxist philosophical framework that rejects the validity of concepts such as rationality and objective truth. It posits two categories: oppressed and oppressors. In Marx’s original formulations, the lens was economic class. The bourgeoisie was the oppressor class and the proletariat were the oppressed. CRT substitutes race for class. According to CRT, the entire system of a society is defined by those who have power (whites) and those who don’t (people of color).”

• Shannon Prince, a lawyer and legal commentator, argued, “The fact is, critical race theory offers a framework for making sense of society’s injustices — it doesn’t prescribe a partisan way of fixing them. Critical race theorists can tackle that challenge from a perspective like that of Milton or Marx or Moses.”

• Former Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts (R) argued, “In 2021, communism seems like a distant threat to many. Generations of Americans have learned about the atrocities committed by Stalin and Lenin in Russia. Many are familiar with Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which led to the Great Chinese Famine and starvation and death for millions. Sadly, communism isn’t something that’s just studied in history books. There’s growing awareness across our state and country that it’s reinventing itself right here at home under the label of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Instead of the old narrative of class warfare, CRT envisions a race-based Marxism that divides people along racial lines. It’s packaged under innocuous sounding terms such as ‘equity’ or ‘anti-racism,’ but it seeks to re-write our country’s history and reimagine public policy all based on a Marxist worldview.”

• Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic said, “So we gathered at that convent for two and a half days, around a table in an austere room with stained glass windows and crucifixes here and there - an odd place for a bunch of Marxists - and worked out a set of principles. Then we went our separate ways. Most of us who were there have gone on to become prominent critical race theorists, including Kim Crenshaw, who spoke at the Iowa conference, as well as Mani Matsuda and Charles Lawrence, who both are here in spirit. Derrick Bell, who was doing critical race theory long before it had a name, was at the Madison workshop and has been something of an intellectual godfather for the movement.”

• Delgado and Stefancic continued, “This relates to a Marxist concept, that of ‘surplus value.’ Essentially, Marx held that workers in a shoe factory are never going to be paid enough by their employer to afford the product they make. Capitalism always functions in this way, by expanding and moving products up to consumers with more money than the producers are paid. That is what creates a positive profit margin. My theory of ‘surplus education’ relates to the surplus value concept. In surplus education, the system provides education for workers so that they are able to function in their work. But the education is ‘surplus’ in that someone who is taught how to count is able to use that knowledge both for her work and in her life outside of work. In this way, education has unintended positive effects in society, and empowers workers to change the system that they are meant to inhabit.”

If critical race theory is wrong or unnecessary, then why?

Argument: Critical race theory is divisive

This argument posits that CRT exacerbates racial divisions, undermines racial equality under the law, reinforces negative stereotypes about people of color, and fosters discrimination against some minority groups, such as Asian Americans.

Claim: Critical race theory promotes racial conflict

This claim suggests that CRT creates division between individuals based on race. CRT reinforces racial stereotypes and encourages discrimination against white people, according to this claim.

• Mackubin Owens, a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, argued, “But in the end, CRT is nothing more than a return to 1850s-style racism as espoused by John Calhoun and Chief Justice Roger Taney in his infamous Dred Scott decision. It is divisive; it fosters racial hatred by trafficking in racial stereotypes, collective guilt, racial segregation and race-based harassment. It rejects Martin Luther King’s hope that we should be judged, not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character.”

• Stephen Sawchuk, assistant managing editor for Education Week wrote, “A recent poll by the advocacy group Parents Defending Education claimed some schools were teaching that ‘white people are inherently privileged, while Black and other people of color are inherently oppressed and victimized’; that ‘achieving racial justice and equality between racial groups requires discriminating against people based on their whiteness’; and that ‘the United States was founded on racism.’ Thus much of the current debate appears to spring not from the academic texts, but from fear among critics that students—especially white students—will be exposed to supposedly damaging or self-demoralizing ideas.”

• Ellie Krasne, former manager for Public Programs in Events and Programming at The Heritage Foundation, contended, “Regrettably, this divisiveness can be applied to all leftist doctrine, including and especially Marxism, from which critical race theory is derived. Critical race theory does not seek equality or justice. Instead, it categorizes people. One’s gender, race, or sexual orientation posits you as the oppressed or an oppressor—a status from which you are freed only when all existing societal structures, which are inherently racist, are overthrown.”

• American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Research Fellow Max Eden maintained, “Most of the common clauses in these laws prohibit the kind of state-sponsored racism that parents instinctively know has no place in schools: teaching students that ‘one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex,’ that ‘an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently privileged, racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously,’ or ‘ascribing character traits, values, moral or ethical codes, privileges or beliefs to a race or sex or to an individual because of the individual’s race or sex.’ These laws would prohibit schools from emulating Illinois’ Evanston/Skokie school district, which taught that ‘whiteness is a bad deal,’ that white students should consider ‘what it means to be white but not [be] a part of whiteness’ and where CRT-inspired educators routinely insist that it is their mission to disrupt and dismantle ‘whiteness.’”

• Scholar Jeff Zorn contended, “At eye level, CRT education serves less salutary purposes. It prompts students with poor academic skills to make no priority of improving them. It conditions students to see others merely as race members, then interact along some Byzantine scale of comparative oppression. It beckons nonwhites to judge ‘White Culture’ opprobrious and their own flawless. It baits the nation into fuller, angrier fragmentation.”

• Zorn continued, “Persuasively appealing for civic inclusion, searching out the best in supporters and antagonists alike, claiming the high grounds of reconciliation, nonviolence, and interracial comity: CRT judges these to be markers of inauthenticity. Reinforcing enclave walls, essentializing race, romanticizing cultural disadvantage, finding prickly separatism ‘liberating’: CRT judges these to be markers of ‘authentic black personality.’”

• Law professor Douglas E. Litowitz argued, “Much CRT scholarship seems to be infused with the mistaken notion that blacks have a unique ability to write about how the law affects blacks, that only Hispanics can really see how the law affects Hispanics, that white judges can't act as good judges in cases involving these ‘out-groups.’ So the movement can easily fracture into a composite of diverse people who write about themselves and their out-group; each person claims a scholarship interest in his own ethnicity or gender or both. … Part of the problem here is that CRT seems to fall victim to balkanization, a splintering effect in which each racial, ethnic, or gender category becomes a unitary focus, to the neglect of the fragile overlapping consensus which binds us.”

Claim: Critical race theory is prejudiced against the achievements of Asian Americans

This claim suggests that supporters of CRT do not classify Asian Americans as people of color and are therefore prejudiced against them.

• Jeff Zorn posited, “White supremacy as the leading element of national educational practice and social ideology is belied by the achievements of Asian Americans, who surpass whites both in school achievement and in earnings. CRT zealots respond by insulting Asian Americans as imitators of ‘Whiteness’ and claiming that whites allow such success when this furthers their interests. But Asian American students do not ‘act White.’ Nor does anybody allow their success; the students win colorblind competitions and carry scholastic advantage into adulthood. CRT’s last recourse is to deny that Asian Americans are ‘of color,’ a desperate, malicious dodge to protect more of its circular reasoning.”

Claim: Critical race theory can reinforce negative stereotypes about people of color

This claim suggests that CRT emphasizes storytelling as opposed to rigorously researched articles, reinforcing negative stereotypes about people of color and especially minority law professors.

• Douglas E. Litowitz argued, “As a final point about storytelling, I am concerned about the potential for self-stereotyping that occurs when minority law professors write stories instead of producing exhaustively researched law review articles. The idea that minorities are specially endowed with storytelling abilities but not with analytical skills is precisely the type of stereotype that should be countered.”

Claim: Critical race theory uses language as a weapon

This claim suggests that proponents of CRT use language to manipulate and distort conversations to push a particular set of cultural ideals.

• Author James Lindsay stated, “Anywhere you look, you can see ‘racism’ now means a system of racism. It has nothing to do with your intentions, nothing to do with your beliefs, nothing to do with your behaviors, nothing to do with anything except that the system overall produces disparate outcomes. That’s the sum total of what systemic racism means. I’ve got an encyclopedia I’m writing to define the hundreds upon hundreds of terms that they redefined to their purpose. They exist in Josef Pieper’s described ‘pseudo-reality’ that they’ve created for themselves. One of the points Pieper raises is that once you become locked within a pseudo-reality, you think it’s reality and that everybody else occupies pseudo-realities. The abuse of language is at the absolute center of their project because it’s trying to create a new linguistic lens or distortion field for how you interpret what you see in reality and it’s literally the entire vehicle of their project.”

Argument: Critical race theory contradicts American principles of equality and liberalism

This argument suggests that CRT's assumptions conflict with principles of American equality and liberalism and undermine progress in fulfilling the nation’s founding ideals of equal protection and opportunity.

Claim: Critical race theory is anti-American

This claim suggests the mass adoption of CRT as a framework would destroy the American institutions of property rights, equality under the law, federalism, and free speech in favor of racial essentialism, collective guilt, and neo-segregation.

• Christopher Rufo, senior fellow at The Manhattan Institute, argued, “An equity-based form of government would mean the end not only of private property, but also of individual rights, equality under the law, federalism, and freedom of speech. These would be replaced by race-based redistribution of wealth, group-based rights, active discrimination, and omnipotent bureaucratic authority. Historically, the accusation of ‘anti-Americanism’ has been overused. But in this case, it’s not a matter of interpretation—critical race theory prescribes a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the Declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution.”

• Rufo continued, “When they see what is happening, Americans are naturally outraged that critical race theory promotes three ideas—race essentialism, collective guilt, and neo-segregation—which violate the basic principles of equality and justice. Anecdotally, many Chinese-Americans have told me that having survived the Cultural Revolution in their former country, they refuse to let the same thing happen here.”

Claim: Critical race theory promotes equity over equality

This claim suggests that CRT promotes equity over equality. Equality is understood as equal rights and opportunities for all people, whereas equity is understood as a granting of resources and opportunities to individuals based on their circumstances to achieve fair and equal outcomes. The promotion of equity over equality jeopardizes the constitutional right to equality before the law, according to this claim.

• Christopher Rufo argued, “There are a series of euphemisms deployed by its supporters to describe critical race theory, including ‘equity,’ ‘social justice,’ ‘diversity and inclusion,’ and ‘culturally responsive teaching.’ Critical race theorists, masters of language construction, realize that ‘neo-Marxism’ would be a hard sell. Equity, on the other hand, sounds non-threatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality. But the distinction is vast and important. Indeed, equality—the principle proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, defended in the Civil War, and codified into law with the 14th and 15th Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—is explicitly rejected by critical race theorists. To them, equality represents ‘mere nondiscrimination’ and provides ‘camouflage’ for white supremacy, patriarchy, and oppression.”

• Rufo continued, “An equity-based form of government would mean the end not only of private property, but also of individual rights, equality under the law, federalism, and freedom of speech. These would be replaced by race-based redistribution of wealth, group-based rights, active discrimination, and omnipotent bureaucratic authority. Historically, the accusation of ‘anti-Americanism’ has been overused. But in this case, it’s not a matter of interpretation—critical race theory prescribes a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the Declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution.”

• Rufo continued, “I have organized a coalition of attorneys to file lawsuits against schools and government agencies that impose critical race theory-based programs on grounds of the First Amendment (which protects citizens from compelled speech), the Fourteenth Amendment (which provides equal protection under the law), and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which prohibits public institutions from discriminating on the basis of race).”

• A Liberty Justice Center article contended, “In Loudoun County Public Schools, participation in the Student Equity Ambassadors Program is limited to ‘students of color’ and those who claim specific political ideology. The program is then paired with a ‘Bias Reporting System,’ that turns students into the speech police, with the power to name and shame peers for expressing viewpoints inconsistent with critical race theory. Students suspected of straying from CRT ideology are reported to school officials.”

• James Lindsay argued, “If we throw out equality theory or neutrality, who do you think is going to get to decide what is going to be the right distribution, the right treatment? We see this just happened recently in a Boston teaching hospital underneath Harvard. It has instituted, within at least one of its departments, a cardiology department, preferential admissions for patients, even against the evidence, by race. If they’re doing this literally in medicine—preferential care by racial category—it’s around the corner for law, i.e., preferential treatment for exonerating circumstances. Equality before the law, where the law doesn’t care who’s standing in front of them, whatever their skin color, whatever their ethnicity, whatever their national origin, or whatever it is, gender, sex, et cetera, is a bedrock principle to achieving a society where fairness is going to happen. If you want justice, if you even want whatever people think of as social justice, you better start with equality before the law.”

Claim: Critical race theory fails to recognize that color-blind policies have contributed to the advancement of Black Americans

This claim suggests that Black Americans have experienced societal advancements since the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement because society began focusing less on race, which conflicts with the foundations of CRT.

• Mackubin Owens contended, “CRT is fundamentally at odds with the principles that underpinned all advances in the rights of Black Americans, from the Civil War constitutional amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1964: that all Americans should be treated equally, regardless of race, color, creed, or religion.”

• Christopher Rufo argued, “Fortunately, the early proponents of this revolutionary coalition in the U.S. lost out in the 1960s to the civil rights movement, which sought instead the fulfillment of the American promise of freedom and equality under the law. Americans preferred the idea of improving their country to that of overthrowing it. The vision of Martin Luther King, Jr., President Johnson’s pursuit of the Great Society, and the restoration of law and order promised by President Nixon in his 1968 campaign defined the post-1960s American political consensus. But the radical Left has proved resilient and enduring—which is where critical race theory comes in.”

• Jeff Zorn asserted, “The civil rights movement envisioned race mattering less and less, but CRT envisions race eclipsing everything. Scholarship in its name always calls to mind the aphorism, ‘When your only tool is a hammer, the whole world looks like nails.’ Schools and universities, full of vibrancy and drama, become desiccated bastions of ‘Whiteness.’ Three-dimensional individuals, complex and fascinating, bursting with idiosyncratic strengths and frailties, become racialized stick figures.”

Claim: Critical race theory is a critique of the United States' founding principles

This claim suggests that CRT rejects the constitutional ideals of the United States and aims to label the nation's founding principles as racist.

• Mackubin Owens argued, “But CRT attacks the American Founding. Advocates of CRT do not wish to fulfill the promises of the American Founding, which they regard as racist. Instead, they want to replace the principles of the Founding with something radically different, for instance, replacing such concepts as ‘equality’ with ‘equity’ and subverting the meaning of ‘justice.’”

• Jonathan Butcher and Mike Gonzalez with The Heritage Foundation contended, “Critical Race Theory began as an academic concept, but we can find the ideas all around us today, from schoolhouses to the corporate world to Hollywood. Racism and intolerance should have no place in America, but CRT is more than just a philosophical objection to discrimination. When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based. No nation, not even America, is perfect, but as Abraham Lincoln said in his address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield in 1838, ‘There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.’ We must restore the ‘temple of liberty…with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason.’ Our generation, and every generation, must ‘let the proud fabric of freedom rest’ upon the ideas of liberty, ‘a reverence for the constitution and laws,’ and the pursuit of a civil society that offers freedom and opportunity to all Americans, regardless of the color of their skin.”

• The Goldwater Institute argued, “When followed to its logical conclusions, Critical Race Theory is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our freedom is based. Critical Theorists have perverted the idea of justice and deny everyone’s rightful claim to an opportunity to pursue the American Dream.”

• Christopher Rufo contended, “There are a series of euphemisms deployed by its supporters to describe critical race theory, including ‘equity,’ ‘social justice,’ ‘diversity and inclusion,’ and ‘culturally responsive teaching.’ Critical race theorists, masters of language construction, realize that ‘neo-Marxism’ would be a hard sell. Equity, on the other hand, sounds non-threatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality. But the distinction is vast and important. Indeed, equality—the principle proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, defended in the Civil War, and codified into law with the 14th and 15th Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—is explicitly rejected by critical race theorists. To them, equality represents ‘mere nondiscrimination’ and provides ‘camouflage’ for white supremacy, patriarchy, and oppression.”

• Rufo continued, “An equity-based form of government would mean the end not only of private property, but also of individual rights, equality under the law, federalism, and freedom of speech. These would be replaced by race-based redistribution of wealth, group-based rights, active discrimination, and omnipotent bureaucratic authority. Historically, the accusation of ‘anti-Americanism’ has been overused. But in this case, it’s not a matter of interpretation—critical race theory prescribes a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the Declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution.”

Claim: Critical race theory is anti-free speech

This argument contends that CRT promotes compelled speech and discrimination against political views contrary to CRT in schools and society.

• Christopher Rufo asserted, “I have organized a coalition of attorneys to file lawsuits against schools and government agencies that impose critical race theory-based programs on grounds of the First Amendment (which protects citizens from compelled speech), the Fourteenth Amendment (which provides equal protection under the law), and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which prohibits public institutions from discriminating on the basis of race).”

• A Liberty Justice Center article contended, “In Loudoun County Public Schools, participation in the Student Equity Ambassadors Program is limited to ‘students of color’ and those who claim specific political ideology. The program is then paired with a ‘Bias Reporting System,’ that turns students into the speech police, with the power to name and shame peers for expressing viewpoints inconsistent with critical race theory. Students suspected of straying from CRT ideology are reported to school officials.”

• Law professor Daniel Subotnik argued, “The effect of free speech on race in America is an enormously complicated matter that cannot be dealt with fairly in a short article. But is there not a central contradiction here? If words have no consequences, if they cannot allow us ‘to escape the confines of our own preconceptions,’ how can the images that the authors decry have caused any damage? If words do have consequences, if we have paid a heavy price for the imagery just referred to, why can we not combat these images through argument and counterimages? Why must we ‘deepen suspicion of remedies for deep-seated social evils that rely on speech and exhortation’? If restrictions were to be imposed, moreover, who would decide what could be said by and about minorities? Finally, who gets more from free speech than a group for whom the truth-value of language seems to be of only secondary import?”

• Mackubin Owens contended, “Regarding free speech, CRT employs a rhetorical tool developed by the neo-Marxist philosopher Hebert Marcuse: ‘repressive tolerance.’ According to Marcuse, to tolerate all ideas — the essence of reasonable discourse that traditionally has defined the mission of education — is, in fact, repressive, since it does not ‘privilege’ the ‘correct’ ideas. True tolerance, Marcuse argued, ‘would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.’”

Claim: Critical race theory misunderstands liberalism

This claim suggests that CRT does not properly understand liberalism. CRT's critique of liberalism, which emphasizes individual dignity, fairness, and due process, according to this claim, is counter-productive.

• Douglas E. Litowitz argued, “In Critical Race Theory we are informed that CRT is ‘discontent with liberalism,’ which is not uncommon nowadays, but ‘liberalism’ is being understood as ‘a system of civil rights litigation and activism characterized by incrementalism, faith in the legal system, and hope for progress, among other things.’ This is an unusual characterization of liberalism, which raises the question whether CRT is properly critiquing liberalism at all. According to most thinkers, the classic tenet of liberalism is that the right precedes the good: the state should be neutral between competing conceptions of the good life. For liberals, the main purpose of the law is to protect citizens from harm by others (including the government and its agents), so that individuals can be free to pursue their own plans in free agreement with others. In exchange for state protection, the individual agrees to obey the law and not harm other people. This is the classical liberal position which runs through the work of John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, and Ronald Dworkin. Typically, liberals endorse representative democracy and a limited welfare state, organized under a republic which follows the rule of law and guarantees the equality, liberty, and property interests of its citizens. Certainly liberals can disagree over political questions such as the proper extent of taxation or conscription, and they can also disagree on whether a liberal society should support affirmative action, euthanasia, or boxing. But liberalism is characterized by a core commitment to equal rights, autonomy, and due process. And so it is puzzling to see liberalism defined by Delgado (and others in CRT) as a movement distinguished by a belief in progress and a faith in the legal system.”

• Litowitz continued, “I am not persuaded by those sections of the anthology that set out CRT's critique of liberalism. Given liberalism's emphasis on individual dignity, fairness, and due process, it would seem that CRT should embrace the fundamental tenets of liberalism, especially because liberals have been active supporters of minority rights since the early 1960s. If indeed CRT finds it necessary to critique liberalism as a doctrine, then it must do so in the proper way, by looking at key liberal theorists and pointing out their errors. This requires an engagement with Rawls, Dworkin, and Feinberg, an engagement which CRT has yet to initiate. Finally, if liberalism is to be rejected, we must find a replacement approach and understand how this new approach will preserve individual rights. Solving this problem would be a worthwhile project for a critical race scholar.”

Argument: Critical race theory is too revolutionary

This argument says that CRT is too revolutionary and demands significant change in all American institutions, including education.

• Christopher Rufo posited, “This is a revolutionary change. When originally established, these government institutions were presented as neutral, technocratic, and oriented towards broadly-held perceptions of the public good. Today, under the increasing sway of critical race theory and related ideologies, they are being turned against the American people. This isn’t limited to the permanent bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., but is true as well of institutions in the states, even in red states, and it is spreading to county public health departments, small Midwestern school districts, and more. This ideology will not stop until it has devoured all of our institutions.”

• Rufo continued, “Americans across the political spectrum have failed to separate the premise of critical race theory from its conclusion. Its premise—that American history includes slavery and other injustices, and that we should examine and learn from that history—is undeniable. But its revolutionary conclusion—that America was founded on and defined by racism and that our founding principles, our Constitution, and our way of life should be overthrown—does not rightly, much less necessarily, follow.”

• Jeff Zorn argued, “Today, CRT is ‘an increasingly permanent fixture…no longer in its infancy… To the contrary, CRT has evolved into a type of revolutionary project.’ This project has found a secure home in graduate schools of education. From those quarters has come a plethora of publications taking CRT tenets—which range from overstated to dead wrong—as unquestioned first principles. Readers needn’t bother slogging toward the papers’ findings, as these are written into the framing. Schools will be revealed as pervasively racist; curriculum and pedagogy will shortchange and alienate students of color; white teachers will harbor low expectations and crippling biases; equality of opportunity, colorblind merit, and objective assessment will be debunked as cruel phantasms.”

Argument: Critical race theory is structurally, theoretically, and historically flawed

This argument contends that there are structural problems in CRT's approach to scholarship that contradict proper academic methodology and logical reasoning.

Claim: The theoretical foundation of critical race theory is not supported

This claim suggests that the theoretical foundation of CRT is unsubstantial and has no significant grounds to establish such theoretical claims.

• Law professor Daniel Subotnik argued, “On another level, what if Williams has missed the central point? What if our already free-wheeling culture cannot be decentralized further because a modern nation, to be viable as such, must have a national culture? What if there is no acceptable substitute in this country for a more equitable distribution of wealth, and what if for this purpose more integration into mainstream society is required? What if most [CRT advocates (CRATs)] are, at bottom (as Williams says she has been charged with being), ‘lonely discontents ... who don't know when to stop complaining, [and worse] who fill in meaning when none was meant’? And, last, what if because of their Ivy League affiliations, CRATs are having far more influence than their numbers would suggest? ‘We must begin to think… about the fiercely coalescing power of the media to spark mistrust,’ writes Williams, ‘to fan it into forest fires of fear and revenge.’ But, under these circumstances, who would Americans have more to fear from than the CRATs?”

• Subotnik continued, “Spreading a range of unbaked antiblack conspiracy theories, trying to transform social pathologies into new cultural paradigms, and disseminating despair at every turn - actions that are taken for clinical symptoms - CRATs, I am suggesting, are in the way”

Claim: Critical race theory is based on a dishonest historical narrative

This argument says CRT promotes an inaccurate and pessimistic historical narrative. Proponents argue that American history contains injustices but also idealistic achievements that both deserve to be covered fairly.

• Christopher F. Rufo, founder and director of Battlefront, argued, “Similarly, in addition to pointing out the dishonesty of the historical narrative on which critical race theory is predicated, we must promote the true story of America—a story that is honest about injustices in American history, but that places them in the context of our nation’s high ideals and the progress we have made towards realizing them. Genuine American history is rich with stories of achievements and sacrifices that will move the hearts of Americans—in stark contrast to the grim and pessimistic narrative pressed by critical race theorists.”

Claim: Critical race theory is structurally flawed

This claim suggests that the foundation of CRT is structurally flawed and is based on fundamental misunderstandings of legal scholarship.

• Douglas E. Litowitz argued, “Now for the bad news. After a thorough reading, and even rereading, I cannot shake the feeling that there are some systematic problems with CRT. I use the term systematic to indicate my contention that much of the work in CRT is problematic at the level of deep structure; that in many cases CRT takes an approach that embodies fundamental errors or confusions about the proper role of argumentation within the law and the proper methodology of legal scholarship.”

Claim: Critical race theory does not promote a balanced academic view of issues

This claim suggests that a majority of CRT articles contain the same viewpoint and do not promote a balance of academic views or alternative perspectives.

• Douglas E. Litowitz contended, “Now it is somewhat ironic that so many self-titled ‘outsiders’ are sitting on the faculties at top law schools and publishing in the best law journals. When seventy-five percent of the articles on civil rights are written by ‘outsiders,’ then the term is no longer meaningfully applied. The problem here is not only that the term ‘outsider’ is being misused, but more broadly that it is increasingly hard to find an outside to the ‘outsider’ view. This is an obscure way of saying that many of the CRT articles focus so heavily on the outsider view that they totally neglect any other vantage point. The outside perspective is valuable in the first place because it provides check and balance against the views of the insiders; so that what results is an overall balance between inside and outside. And that is our goal - a balanced view. When a majority of scholars claim to be outsiders, it is hard to find an insider viewpoint to balance the outsider viewpoint. This may sound like an overly academic concern, but it is a very real problem owing to CRT's rejection of the notion that scholarship should consider all sides of an issue.”

Claim: Critical race theory is circular, self-justifying, and unprovable

This claim suggests that studies in CRT are self-contained and unprovable because they operate as circles of thought. CRT does not present its theories as testable hypotheses but rather presents them as fact, according to this claim.

• Jeff Zorn posited, “Why is CRT so reductive? The answer lies in the nature of postmodern Left theory itself. Studies in CLT, CRT, Queer Theory, Critical Semiotics, Transformative Ludic Feminism, and the rest are self-contained, self-justifying circles of thought, conveying postulates, methods, a political ideology, and a policy program. The moment you join the order and don the robes, sweet benefits kick in: niches abound for teaching, lecturing, and publishing; garbled, pretentious writing is recast as possessing a genius above clarity; discarding antique misconceptions such as ‘truth,’ ‘reality,’ and ‘logic’ leaves claims irrefutable; and criticism from outside the paradigm is written off as rationalizing ‘White Hegemony.’ Unlike scientific theories, CRT never construes its claims as testable hypotheses. Instead, it presents them as self-evident axioms that acolytes apply as is. Racism alone causes academic achievement gaps because, by fiat, nothing else can. CRT forbids considering individual ability, motivation, character, family support, and community culture as possible explanations. Even to suggest other causes is to blame the victim, and there conversation ends.”

• Douglas E. Litowitz argued, “It was once (and perhaps remains) a tenet of ultra-orthodox Marxism that the bourgeoisie tolerates advances by the proletariat only when such advances also benefit the bourgeoisie to an even greater extent. This was not called an interest-convergence theory at the time, but it might as well have been. The Marxist formula was designed to advance the party line about the intractability of class warfare and the impossibility of progress without full-scale communist revolution. After all, there is no point in pursuing piecemeal reform when every step forward for the workers is an even greater step for the owners. The problem with the Marxist formula was that it was a piece of pseudoscience incapable of demonstration or refutation. … The same can be said for the much-vaunted interest convergence thesis, which finds its way into a fair amount of CRT scholarship. The interest-convergence thesis originated with Derrick Bell, whose view is paraphrased by Delgado as follows: ‘whites will advance the cause of racial justice only when doing so coincides with their own self-interest.’ According to some critical race theorists, ‘civil rights law was never designed to help blacks,’ and decisions like Brown were decided not on the basis of racial justice, but as a mechanism for whites to win the Cold War. … The interest-convergence thesis seems to hold that blacks can advance only when whites also advance, or in other words, that in every case where blacks advance, whites also advance. This blanket statement can be refuted by a single instance (a single piece of legislation or a single court decision) in which blacks gained and whites did not. Examples of this abound-affirmative action, Title VII, fair housing laws, and prohibitions on red-lining. To say that these much-needed reforms were really an advancement for whites is to reinterpret the facts in a way that is highly implausible.”

Claim: Critical race theory is too reliant on storytelling

This claim suggests that CRT relies heavily on storytelling to promote the ideas of the theory. This approach is problematic because it lacks scholarly evidence and is susceptible to manipulation through counter-stories, according to this claim.

• Jeff Zorn argued, “Another shortcut in CRT involves the racial counter-story, which is ‘an essential component to educational research employing a critical race framework.’ Beginning with founders Derrick Bell and Patricia Williams, CRT has routinely assigned inordinate evidentiary value to narratives that further the political agenda. As defined by Dorian L. McCoy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, associate professor of higher education, and Dirk J. Rodricks, an employee of the University of Toronto Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, counter-storytelling is ‘a tool for exposing, analyzing and challenging the majoritarian stories of racial privilege…that aims to cast doubt on the validity of accepted premises or myths, especially held by the majority.’ So conceived as a ‘tool,’ the counter-story comes with sampling biases and an unconcern for veracity that deny it the status of valid scholarly evidence.”

• Douglas E. Litowitz contended, “All of this storytelling is interesting, even fascinating, but I think it can be dangerous as well. As lawyers, we seek doctrinal solutions to problems, and indeed this is precisely what distinguishes us from the public at large. For example, the general public is free to see a criminal trial (OJ. Simpson's, say) as a story about good and evil, black and white, or love and hate, whereas lawyers see it through the filter of the law - in terms of probable cause, hearsay exceptions, burdens of proof, permissible jury instructions, rights to suppress evidence, and so on. We are lawyers precisely because we do something more than listen to stories: we filter stories through the framework of legal doctrine. While it may be useful for lawyers to see the facts of a case as a narrative construction, or even to think of the law itself as a work of fiction, lawyers must look beyond stories to questions of doctrine, policy, and argument. There is a danger in storytelling precisely because it can lead in any and every direction, politically speaking. It is true that narratives about oppressed groups often lead to left-leaning social reform for the simple reason that narratives tend to humanize people whom we would otherwise consider outsiders. For example, when we read in the anthology about the experiences of minority CRT scholars struggling against racism, we begin to identify with them, and, frankly, we start rooting for them. Of course, if one identifies with people of color or with women, it is possible that one will be more likely to understand their side of an issue. But this cuts both ways. If one set of narratives can make us more sympathetic to people of color, it stands to reason that a different set of narratives can make us less sensitive. … We can easily imagine the emergence of narratives and stories in which white authors describe the experience of being denied entry into professional schools when they would have been accepted had they been black or female. In extreme cases it might be imagined that such authors would use storytelling to glorify a white utopian society without minorities. The error by CRT is to think that storytelling is inherently liberating when in fact it is inherently neutral - neither liberal nor conservative, neither constraining nor freeing.”

• Litowitz continued, “Another danger of legal storytelling is that it plays upon emotion, instead of reason, and therefore it can convince people to adopt a position without giving them a doctrinal basis for it. Suppose you were uncommitted in the last presidential election, and I wanted to persuade you to vote for Bill Clinton. One method that I might use would be to cite Clinton's accomplishments, his attempt to balance the budget, his health-care proposal, or his record of judicial appointments. These are all relevant points because they bear directly on his ability to serve the country. But now suppose that I suddenly realize that these arguments, while relevant, may not work; in fact, you stand ready to present some counter-evidence against my points. In that case, I might switch tactics and try to convince you by telling a story. I might tell you about what it was like for Clinton to grow up as a poor child in the rural South, how he struggled from humble beginnings to realize the American dream of becoming President. My goal would be to move you emotionally so that you undergo a psychological conversion in which you find yourself voting for him even though you remain unconvinced of his qualifications. The problem with convincing people in this way is that it is circuitous and skirts the real issues; it is a way of convincing people at any cost, in order to serve a higher cause. CRT sometimes works similarly, where issues that should be decided on doctrinal grounds by looking at federal law (issues like affirmative action, free speech, and criminal sentencing) are determined by stories, personal accounts, and other miscellanea.”

• Litowitz continued, “As a final point about storytelling, I am concerned about the potential for self-stereotyping that occurs when minority law professors write stories instead of producing exhaustively researched law review articles. The idea that minorities are specially endowed with storytelling abilities but not with analytical skills is precisely the type of stereotype that should be countered.”

If critical race theory is right or necessary, then why?

Argument: Critical race theory is unifying

This argument suggests that CRT allows for greater understanding between diverse groups of people. Proponents of this argument do not think CRT is divisive or necessarily political.

Claim: Critical race theory is not divisive

This argument says that CRT does not create division or promote divisive concepts. Opponents who argue that CRT is racially divisive do so to discourage conversations about systemic racism, according to this argument.

• Matthew Lynch posited, “Critical race theory is not anti-American, divisive, or hostile. This portrayal is a deliberately politicized misrepresentation of the idea intended only to stop and discourage any discussion about systemic racism, which is present in American society. What CRT does is highlight the cause and effect of slavery that are deeply embedded in the institutions of America and their role in ensuring that white dominance is maintained.”

• Ibram X. Kendi posited, “The United States is not in the midst of a ‘culture war’ over race and racism. The animating force of our current conflict is not our differing values, beliefs, moral codes, or practices. The American people aren’t divided. The American people are being divided. Republican operatives have buried the actual definition of critical race theory: ‘a way of looking at law’s role platforming, facilitating, producing, and even insulating racial inequality in our country,’ as the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who helped coin the term, recently defined it. Instead, the attacks on critical race theory are based on made-up definitions and descriptors. ‘Critical race theory says every white person is a racist,’ Senator Ted Cruz has said. ‘It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin,’ said the Alabama state legislator Chris Pringle. There are differing points of view about race and racism. But what we are seeing and hearing on news shows, in school-district meetings, in op-ed pages, in legislative halls, and in social-media feeds aren’t multiple sides with differing points of view. There’s only one side in our so-called culture war right now.”

• Professors Chandra L. Ford and Collins O. Airhihenbuwa write, “Critical Race Theory challenges widely held but erroneous beliefs that ‘race consciousness’’ is synonymous with ‘racism’ and that ‘colorblindness’ is synonymous with the absence of racism. Colorblindness, which is both an attitude and a school of thought, posits that nonracial factors (e.g., income) fundamentally explain ostensibly racial phenomena. Although abuses of race-conscious research (such as early eugenics research) have been noted, in truth, both race consciousness and colorblindness can be deployed in ways that contribute to inequities. Only colorblindness, however, precludes explicit examination of racism’s potential contributions to inequities. Race consciousness is essential for understanding racialized constructs and mechanisms.”

Argument: Critical race theory is anti-racist

This argument says CRT creates an awareness of unconscious individual racial biases and what supporters call systemic racism.

• Matthew Lynch contended, “CRT emphasizes the real-world impact of Race and Racism. CRT openly challenges the racist discourse and highlights the effects of race and racism on the identities, bodies, and life experiences of people of color. That way, it also explains the magnitude of the impact of racism because it, as a social condition, goes above [and] beyond the scope of individual and intentional acts of racism and must, therefore, be understood at social, institutional, political, economic, and historical levels (De La Garza & Ono, 2016).”

• Adam Harris, staff writer for The Atlantic, contended, “The approach ‘is often disruptive because its commitment to anti-racism goes well beyond civil rights, integration, affirmative action, and other liberal measures,’ Bell explained in 1995. The theory’s proponents argue that the nation’s sordid history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination is embedded in our laws, and continues to play a central role in preventing Black Americans and other marginalized groups from living lives untouched by racism.”

• Anti-racist activist and historian Ibram X. Kendi argued, “And yet, some don’t want the American people to stop and see. They don’t want our kids to learn about the racism causing racial inequity. They are trying to ban teaching it in schools; Florida passed the latest such ban last Thursday. They can’t acknowledge racial inequity because to acknowledge it is to discuss why it exists and persists. To discuss why racial inequity exists and persists is to point to the libraries of nonpartisan studies documenting widespread racism in the United States. To say that there is widespread racial inequity caused by widespread racism, which makes the United States racist, isn’t an opinion, isn’t a partisan position, isn’t a doctrine, isn’t a left-wing construct, isn’t anti-white, and isn’t anti-American. It is a fact. But in recent years, some have reduced a host of facts to beliefs. ‘I don’t believe that,’ Donald Trump said in September when a reporter asked him about the existence of systemic racism.”

• Sean Illing, host of the podcast The Gray Area, contended, “[Anti-racism is] about teaching the history of racial inequality and the history of racism, to understand that it’s about more than individual acts of racism. The idea is that students — and educators — should have a deep awareness of how racist ideas and practices have been fundamental in shaping our modern world. Students need to be able to have these discussions honestly so that new generations of students aren’t just aware of this history, but can also acknowledge and comprehend how our actions can disrupt those historical patterns or reinforce them. But one thing I tried to do in my piece was remind people that anti-racist teaching isn’t new. We’ve been talking about it in public as though it’s this novel thing, and perhaps it’s because so much of this discussion is about how to teach white students, but for well over a century, Black teachers have been modeling an anti-racist disposition in their pedagogical practices. They recognized how the dreams of their students were at odds with the structural context in which they found themselves. And they had to offer their students ways of thinking about themselves that were life-affirming, despite a society that was physically organized in a way that explicitly told them they were subhuman.”

Argument: Public schools are systemically racist, and critical race theory can help reduce systemic racism

This argument posits that the K-12 and higher education systems produce inequitable outcomes for students of color. Proponents of this argument say a discriminatory system of school funding, teacher hiring, and student discipline contribute to the lower success rate of non-white students. They contend that public school systems need to adopt policies like CRT that acknowledge racism and may improve outcomes for students of color.

Claim: K-12 schools are systemically racist

This claim suggests existing systems related to school funding, teacher hiring, and student discipline are designed to help white students succeed and leave behind non-white students. Proponents of this claim argue that schools need to pursue theories like CRT that seek to acknowledge racism and improve outcomes for students of color.

• Linda Darling-Hammond with The Brookings Institute contended, “The assumptions that undergird this debate miss an important reality: educational outcomes for minority children are much more a function of their unequal access to key educational resources, including skilled teachers and quality curriculum, than they are a function of race. In fact, the U.S. educational system is one of the most unequal in the industrialized world, and students routinely receive dramatically different learning opportunities based on their social status. In contrast to European and Asian nations that fund schools centrally and equally, the wealthiest 10 percent of U.S. school districts spend nearly 10 times more than the poorest 10 percent, and spending ratios of 3 to 1 are common within states. Despite stark differences in funding, teacher quality, curriculum, and class sizes, the prevailing view is that if students do not achieve, it is their own fault. If we are ever to get beyond the problem of the color line, we must confront and address these inequalities.”

• Reporter Hannah Furfaro posited, “Racial inequity is baked into the nation’s education system in ways big and small. Black children face the most extreme hurdles to academic success. Within individual classrooms, teachers may mistake a Black preschooler’s chattiness for hyperactivity or bad behavior, instead of recognizing the child’s skillful storytelling abilities. Within public school districts, recruitment and hiring practices tend to leave out Black educators or pay them less than their peers. Higher education has a long history of excluding Black people entirely. Racism and hate crimes persist on many college campuses. These inequities compound over the years when Black children and adults are in school. Some are insidious, such as false but pervasive cultural messaging that Black students are less capable learners than their peers. Others are overt: K-12 school policies allow students to be arrested on their campuses, and Black students face this fate far more often than others.”

• Kafi D. Kumasi posited, “Early CRT scholars in education such as Ladson-Billings argued that race and racism had yet to be given their full explanatory power in educational scholarship. Therefore, one of the most promising aspects of CRT has been its ability to use theory as a way to systematically uncover the fact that race still is a determining factor in societal inequity and consequently in school inequities (Dixson and Rousseau 2006).”

• David Stovall argued, “Schools often operate as spaces where the realities of race and racism go undiscussed, even if understood by the students. We hear the stories of black and Latino/a students being placed in remedial and special education programs, disproportionately recruited to the military, and suspended at alarming rates. These issues have recently entered the larger stage of academic and broad-based public periodicals (e.g., Institute for Democracy Education and Access, 2002; Lipman, 2004; Lynn, 1999; New York Collective of Radical Educators, 2004), but these inequities have represented the lived reality of students of color for years.”

• Daniel Solorzano posited, “The theoretical foundation for this line of deficit thinking comes from two traditions: the genetic determinist and cultural deficit models. The genetic determinist model takes the position that the low educational attainment of minority students can be traced to deficiencies in their genetic structure (Jensen, 1969; Kamin, 1974; Terman, 1916). In this scenario, there are few social policy options— lacking genetic transformation or total neglect—to raise the educational attainment of minority students. While seemingly out of favor in educational research and policy circles, there is a resurgence of interest in the genetic determinist model resulting from the works of Lloyd Dunn (1987; see Fernandez 1988), the Minnesota Twin Studies (Bouchard, Lykken, McGue, Segal, & Tellegen, 1990), Frederick Goodwin (see Breggin & Breggin, 1993), and Richard Flerrnstein and Charles Murray (1994). The second and more widely used model in this deficit tradition is the culture deficit model. The cultural deficit model contends that minority cultural values, as transmitted through the family, are dysfunctional, and therefore the reason for low educational and later occupational attainment. The model focuses on such deficient cultural values as present versus future time orientation, immediate instead of deferred gratification, an emphasis on cooperation rather than competition, and placing less value on education and upward mobility (see Carter & Segura, 1979). The cultural deficit model also examines deficiencies in minority family internal social structure, such as large, disorganized, female-headed families; Spanish or non-standard English spoken in the home; and patriarchal or matriarchal family structures. These models argue that since minority parents fail to assimilate and embrace the educational values of the dominant group, and continue to transmit or socialize their children with values that inhibit educational mobility, then they are to blame if the low educational attainment continues into succeeding generations.”

• Professor Gloria Ladson-Billings posited, “For the critical race theorist, intelligence testing has been a movement to legitimize African American student deficiency under the guise of scientific rationalism (Alienikoff, 1991; Gould, 1981). According to Marable (1983), one purpose of the African American in the racial/capitalist state is to serve as a symbolic index for poor Whites. If the working-class White is ‘achieving’ at a higher level than Blacks, then they feel relatively superior. This allows Whites with real power to exploit both poor Whites and Blacks. Throughout U.S. history, the subordination of Blacks has been built on ‘scientific’ theories (e.g., intelligence testing) that depend on racial stereotypes about Blacks that make their condition appear appropriate. Crenshaw (1988) contends that the point of controversy is no longer that these stereotypes were developed to rationalize the oppression of Blacks, but rather, ‘[T]he extent to which these stereotypes serve a hegemonic function by perpetuating a mythology about both Blacks and Whites even today, reinforcing an illusion of a White community that cuts across ethnic, gender, and class lines’ (p. 1371). In the classroom, a dysfunctional curriculum coupled with a lack of instructional innovation (or persistence) adds up to poor performance on traditional assessment measures. These assessment measures - crude by most analyses - may tell us that students do not know what it on the test, but fail to tell us what students actually know and are able to do. A telling example of this mismatch between what schools measure and what students know and can do is that of a 10-year-old African American girl who was repeatedly told by the teacher that she was a poor math student. However, the teacher was unaware that the girl was living under incredible stresses where she was assuming responsibilities her drug-addicted mother could not. To ward off child welfare agents the child handled all household responsibilities, including budgeting and paying all the household bills. Her ability to keep the household going made it appear that everything was fine in the household. According to the teacher, she could not do fourth-grade math, but the evidence of her life suggests she was doing just fine at ‘adult’ math!”

Claim: Higher education institutions are systemically racist

This claim suggests existing systems related to student acceptance and educational outcome expectations discriminate against non-white students. Proponents of this claim say higher education institutions need to acknowledge racism with theories like CRT and pursue policies that improve outcomes for students of color.

• Payne Hiraldo argued, “In higher education, racism may be analyzed through a lens that examines the structural impact. When higher education ignores the existence of systematic racism, diversity action plans become ineffective (Iverson, 2007). Instead, these initiatives work to propel and reinforce structural and institutional racism (Ladson-Billings & Tate). Therefore, it is important to consider how well intended institutional processes and procedures can potentially promote racism when working toward improving an institution’s plan for diversity and inclusion.”

• Daniel Solorzano argued, “Using Allport's (1979) definition, I created Figure 1 to show how racial and ethnic stereotypes can be placed into at least three general categories: (1) intelligence and educational stereotypes; (2) personality or character stereotypes; and (3) physical appearance stereotypes. Indeed, these racial stereotypes and related conduct toward Blacks, Chicanas/os, and Native Americans are often times interchangeable between the groups. The fact that Blacks, Chicanas/os, and Native Americans have been and are sometimes seen in the popular media of television, film, and print as ‘dumb,’ ‘violent,’ ‘lazy,’ ‘irresponsible,’ or ‘dirty’ can be used to rationalize their subordinate position in society (Berkeley Art Center, 1982; Bonilla & Girling, 1973). In reality, these stereotypic traits can be used to justify: (1) having low educational and occupational expectations for Students of Color; (2) placing Students of Color in separate schools and, in some cases, separate classrooms within schools; (3) remediating the curriculum and pedagogy for Students of Color; (4) maintaining segregated communities and facilities for People of Color; and (5) expecting Students of Color to one day occupy certain types and levels of occupations. In fact, when we think of welfare, crime, drugs, immigrants, and educational problems, we racialize these issues by painting stereotypic portraits of People of Color (Omi & Winant, 1994).”

CRT should not be taught as part of K-12 curricula

Argument: Critical race theory has an activist component and its assumptions and framework influence school curriculum

This argument says that CRT as a legal theory is not being taught to K-12 students but components of the theory like social justice, activism, and the idea of systemic racism are present in K-12 curriculum.

• The Locke Society argued, “If you are relieved that your school district has not adopted CRT as part of their curriculum, you may want to sit down. Most likely, CRT and ‘social justice’ initiatives are already in your child’s classroom. This is true regardless if your child goes to a public, private, or charter school. You might be in denial and ask how that can be when there hasn’t been any announcement. You might even be thinking, ‘I go over all of the materials sent home with my child.’ While going over the materials is important and does allow some insight into the classroom, it is only a glimpse. Just like every profession, merely seeing one aspect of it does not truly explain everything that goes on. When it comes to teaching, this is especially true as teachers speak to students throughout the lesson, and seize ‘teachable moments’ in which they may veer off their lesson plan into another discussion or lecture, in which they could speak to the points of CRT. ‘Social justice’ and CRT are built into almost every professional organization that provides exceptional teacher training, professional development, and resources. CRT does not show up with flashing lights and bolded slogans every time it is present – it is often subliminal and infused throughout the materials that make up the lesson or training session. The radical left uses red herrings to throw critics off of the real threat, and the more we continue to focus on what they make obvious, the easier it is for them to sneak their agenda past us.”

• Staff for Ed Post contended, “Even though CRT itself is not a topic in most K-12 curricula, some legislators and elected officials have referenced it in connection with any lesson or training that acknowledges racially oppressive practices as districts around the country have started to embrace the idea that Black, Latinx and Indigenous students will do better in school if the systems around them change. This has led to some challenging new practices in our schools and classrooms, such as:
  • Changing the way history is taught to acknowledge the oppression of millions of people based on race in our country.
  • Exposing educators to training and professional development that highlight areas of implicit bias and help them develop skills for overcoming it.
  • Developing new ways to deal with discipline so that Black and brown students are no longer disproportionately targeted.
  • Rethinking how students are identified for advanced courses, accelerated programs, or elite colleges.

For school systems that have operated the same way for decades, these are big changes. There are some who would like to see less change, and believe that the steps above are forcing a new worldview on their kids—even calling it ‘indoctrination.’ In Idaho, Florida, Arkansas and Tennessee, for instance, state governments are acting out of direct concern that critical race theory is at the root of these changes. And about that, they might be right. They needn’t worry that grade-schoolers will start reading legal texts and academic monographs, but the critical race theory movement certainly has played a huge role in the broader reexamination of our society through the lens of race and racial oppression. And schools are a big part of that.”

Argument: Critical race theory's influence in schools harms students

This argument posits that CRT's assumptions promote divisive and racist teaching practices in schools that negatively affect students.

Claim: The assumptions of critical race theory guide divisive and racist teaching practices

This argument says CRT's assumptions and framework should not influence school curricula because they are divisive and promote anti-American ideals.

• Reporter John Murawski argued, “Because of its influence on equity training, anti-racist workplace policies and K-12 education that blame racial disparities on racism and advocate for equal outcomes, CRT faces widespread resistance from conservatives and others who say the critique of ‘whiteness’ and relentless critique of the United States is extremely one-sided and borders on anti-American and anti-white bigotry.”

• Professor Erec Smith argued, “However, putting this theory into practice, especially in primary and secondary schools, is causing more harm than good because it is actually a divisive, debilitating, and racist teaching practice. Unfortunately, when people try to blow the whistle on it, all they hear is, ‘That’s not really CRT, so we don’t care about what you’re saying.’ A divisive, debilitating, and racist teaching practice, by any other name, is still a divisive, debilitating and racist teaching practice.”

Claim: Critical race theory's assumptions foster a victim mentality that holds students of color back

This claim suggests that the framework of CRT perpetuates a victim mentality that harms students of color.

• Jeff Zorn contended, “Crowding out more rounded inquiry, CRT depicts children of color as perpetual victims, their learning problems of interest only as markers of white supremacist conspiracy. To these children CRT offers little more than a noble-sounding excuse not to try, in school and beyond. Trained to scorn all forms of ‘majoritarian’ success, they will instead practice race-first oppositionality.”

• Zorn continued, “To its discredit, CRT grants such agency only to whites. For everyone else, autonomy and efficacy await the overthrow of whiteness. To speed that day, plans for CRT schooling include a politicized curriculum, ‘culturally relevant’ pedagogy, and racially separate schools. There, shielded from white supremacist propaganda (e.g., math, Antigone, the U.S. Constitution), students of color will be immersed in CRT’s ‘revolutionary project.’”

• Zorn continued, “At eye level, CRT education serves less salutary purposes. It prompts students with poor academic skills to make no priority of improving them. It conditions students to see others merely as race members, then interact along some Byzantine scale of comparative oppression. It beckons nonwhites to judge ‘White Culture’ opprobrious and their own flawless. It baits the nation into fuller, angrier fragmentation.”

• Douglas E. Litowitz argued, “But even if the interest-convergence theory were true, what would follow from it? How would it alter the project of reforming the law to achieve greater racial justice? As far as I can tell, it would have absolutely no effect on the effort to defend affirmative action, to push for redistricting of congressional seats, and to advocate greater minority representation in the judiciary. The only effect of the interest-convergence thesis is one of fatalism, to paint a picture of heroic struggle against impossible odds. I can't see how this attitude advances people of color, and I don't see what CRT has to lose by abandoning the interest-convergence thesis.”

Claim: Critical race theory's influence on curriculum puts students at an academic disadvantage

This claim suggests that CRT pushes lower academic standards, which disadvantages students of color.

• Jonathan Butcher and Mike Gonzalez with The Heritage Foundation posited, “Still, this focus on narratives and social issues comes at a time when 82 percent of black fourth graders read at or below what is considered a ‘basic’ level, below the goal for what students should know at this grade, on a national comparison. This figure is 28 percentage points below the same measure for white students. In 2010, Pew Center research reported the staggering statistic that more black men ages 20–34 without a high school diploma are in prison than employed, which means educators are disadvantaging minority youth when they steer K–12 schools away from rigorous content and toward ‘naming your reality.’”

Argument: Critical race theory and its assumptions affect school curricula and are taught to students as facts

This argument posits that CRT practically affects students through curricular standards and lessons that emphasize racial differences and conflicts.

Claim: Critical race theory has an activist component that gives it a practical affinity with education

This claim suggests that CRT is more than an advanced legal theory; instead, it is a theory of political activism that challenges educational norms.

• Scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic argued, “We didn't set out to colonize, but found a natural affinity in education. In education, race neutrality and color-blindness are the reigning orthodoxy. Teachers believe that they treat their students equally. Of course, the outcome figures show that they do not. If you analyze the content, the ideology, the curriculum, the textbooks, the teaching methods, they are the same. But they operate against the radically different cultural backgrounds of young students. Seeing critical race theory take off in education has been a source of great satisfaction for the two of us. Critical race theory is in some ways livelier in education right now than it is in law, where it is a mature movement that has settled down by comparison.”

• Delgado and Stefancic continued, “In the mid 1990s, educators began to hear about critical race theory, and a few of them started out studying basic writings in the hope of finding ideas that they could apply to the problems they were studying. African American, Latino, and other minority graduate students who planned to go out into the community and become teachers and reform schools began to find each other in their field, just as the critical race theory and law people found each other there earlier. They decided they would publish a collection of writings some of them had been working on in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, exposing a broader audience to their ideas. The ideas took hold quickly because they addressed misunderstandings of the way that racism functions in education and the public schools. You hear of critical race theory in other disciplines like public health, sociology, philosophy, and social work. Critical race theory functions on a more abstract level in those fields than in education. In education, educators were trying to figure out ways to address inadequacies in curriculum, school discipline, tracking, funding, standardized tests, power dynamics in schools, and the canonical debates. In 2006, at the annual conference of the American Educational and Research Association, the umbrella association of education scholars, a major theme was ‘Critical Race Theory in Education.’ Internationally, a conference on exactly this subject took place in June 2009 in the United Kingdom.”

• Christopher Rufo argued, “What does critical race theory look like in practice? Last year, I authored a series of reports focused on critical race theory in the federal government. The FBI was holding workshops on intersectionality theory. The Department of Homeland Security was telling white employees they were committing ‘microinequities’ and had been ‘socialized into oppressor roles.’ The Treasury Department held a training session telling staff members that ‘virtually all white people contribute to racism’ and that they must convert ‘everyone in the federal government’ to the ideology of ‘antiracism.’ And the Sandia National Laboratories, which designs America’s nuclear arsenal, sent white male executives to a three-day reeducation camp, where they were told that ‘white male culture’ was analogous to the ‘KKK,’ ‘white supremacists,’ and ‘mass killings.’ The executives were then forced to renounce their ‘white male privilege’ and write letters of apology to fictitious women and people of color. This year, I produced another series of reports focused on critical race theory in education. In Cupertino, California, an elementary school forced first-graders to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, and rank themselves according to their ‘power and privilege.’ In Springfield, Missouri, a middle school forced teachers to locate themselves on an ‘oppression matrix,’ based on the idea that straight, white, English-speaking, Christian males are members of the oppressor class and must atone for their privilege and ‘covert white supremacy.’ In Philadelphia, an elementary school forced fifth-graders to celebrate ‘Black communism’ and simulate a Black Power rally to free 1960s radical Angela Davis from prison, where she had once been held on charges of murder. And in Seattle, the school district told white teachers that they are guilty of ‘spirit murder’ against black children and must ‘bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgement of [their] thieved inheritance.’ I’m just one investigative journalist, but I’ve developed a database of more than 1,000 of these stories. When I say that critical race theory is becoming the operating ideology of our public institutions, it is not an exaggeration—from the universities to bureaucracies to k-12 school systems, critical race theory has permeated the collective intelligence and decision-making process of American government, with no sign of slowing down.”

• Jeff Zorn posited, “Emerging in the late 1980s, Critical Race Theory (CRT) deepened CLT’s [Critical Legal Theory’s] analysis of race, extended it to education, and set out to explain achievement gaps between students ‘of color’ and their white peers. (CRT writings use the phrase ‘of color’ to refer to African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. Throughout, however, CRT has focused almost exclusively on African Americans.) CRT’s answer conceded nothing to ‘culture of poverty’ theories blaming ‘non-White’ students, families, and communities. Instead, it claimed, structural racism consigns nonwhites to failure. Educators may think they sound enlightened in saying, ‘I don’t see race; I treat all the children the same,’ but according to CRT, avoiding race means systematically underserving students of color.”

• Zorn continued, “Today, CRT is ‘an increasingly permanent fixture…no longer in its infancy… To the contrary, CRT has evolved into a type of revolutionary project.’ This project has found a secure home in graduate schools of education. From those quarters has come a plethora of publications taking CRT tenets—which range from overstated to dead wrong—as unquestioned first principles. Readers needn’t bother slogging toward the papers’ findings, as these are written into the framing. Schools will be revealed as pervasively racist; curriculum and pedagogy will shortchange and alienate students of color; white teachers will harbor low expectations and crippling biases; equality of opportunity, colorblind merit, and objective assessment will be debunked as cruel phantasms."

• Researcher Max Eden contended, “Parents may wonder how our public schools became propaganda mills. The answer, to paraphrase Hemingway, is two ways: gradually, then suddenly. Critical race theory was largely pioneered in U.S. schools of education; a generation of teachers has been trained in its toxic assumptions. Then, after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May, a host of major education trade associations publicly vowed to imprint this ideology onto the next generation.”

• Eden continued, “It will be up to parents to watch closely what their children are being taught and to petition their school board when schools cross the line between education and indoctrination. Unfortunately, to the extent that school administrators have genuinely absorbed critical race ideology, they will dismiss objections to their ‘anti-racist’ curriculum as motivated by racism. We may soon reach a point where parents who want their children to grow up to be well-informed and open-minded citizens may have little choice but to withdraw them from American public schools.”

• Kerry McDonald with The Cato Institute argued, “Some students may not even realize that there are different viewpoints and values, conditioned as they are from their early days of schooling to accept whatever their teachers say. And their teachers are being similarly conditioned, spending time in colleges of education that tie grades to ideological activism and link achievement to allegiance with an approved interpretation of concepts like ‘social justice’ and critical race theory.”

• President Donald Trump (R) said, “The left is attempting to destroy that beautiful vision and divide Americans by race in the service of political power. By viewing every issue through the lens of race, they want to impose a new segregation, and we must not allow that to happen. Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country.”

• James Lindsay said, “There are, to use the accursed word, structural elements [of critical race theory] that I think were unleashed by social media—the existence of social media and what social media enables people to do. The internet skews young, so you have very young, idealistic people who are more prone to these ideas and who have also been indoctrinated in the school. Schools have been captured since the 1980s with this critical ideology. They call it ‘critical pedagogy,’ using critical theory as a method of teaching and as a subject of teaching.”

• Professor Daniel Solorzano contended, “Therefore, to paraphrase and extend Matsuda's definition, the overall goal of a critical race theory in teacher education focuses on the work of progressive Teacher Educators of Color and their Fellow Travelers who are trying to develop a pedagogy, curriculum, and research agenda that accounts for the role of race and racism in U.S. education and works toward the elimination of racism as part of a larger goal of eliminating all forms of subordination in education.”

Claim: Children do not have the ability to question the assumptions of critical race theory when they are presented as facts

This claim posits that children often are not capable of questioning teachers when assumptions of CRT, like the presupposition that unequal racial outcomes prove the existence of systemic racism, are presented as facts.

• Sam Lauria argued, “Teachers who push their political agenda can also affect the students with little to no political knowledge. A teacher is an authority figure in the classroom; when they are strong-minded about their politics, it is normal for the students to share that attitude since that is what they are being taught. Once politics are introduced, things get tricky. If a teacher shared his or her political views, the students who are not politically educated will most likely associate the teacher’s opinions as ‘correct’ and not have the ability to figure out their own views. Teachers who force their students to agree with their opinions or ridicule them for disagreeing is extremely detrimental to a student’s confidence. Students who are on the dissenting side of an argument feel like their opinions are highly criticized and may become afraid to share their opinions in the classroom.”

• Mike Gonzalez and James Quarles with The Heritage Foundation contended, “Too many public schools have largely given up on the teaching of logic, civics, rhetoric, philosophy or classical languages—the subjects that previously turned schoolchildren into educated Americans. Instead, many schools are now focused on indoctrinating their wards with radical ideologies that seek to undermine the foundation of the United States by returning to the regressive idea that we must separate people by race, which activists insist is somehow progressive.”

CRT should be taught in K-12 schools and institutions of higher education

Argument: The assumptions of CRT can guide better outcomes in schools

This argument posits that the assumptions of CRT can guide the development of school curricula that produce better outcomes for students. The assumptions of CRT also help teach students to recognize and address systemic racism, according to this argument.

Claim: Teaching students about systemic racism improves academic performance

This claim suggests that students are more engaged academically and more likely to perform well in school when they learn about what proponents of CRT call systemic racism.

• Matthew Lynch argued, “Conner (2021) found in her studies that two-third of active youth organizers from the lowest-performing schools in Philadephia showed significant improvement in their grades. This is endorsed by the findings of other scholars who found that youth organizers mostly receive A or B grades in high schools and attend college for four years at a higher rate. Ironically, the more young people become aware of the prevalent inequalities at schools, the less alienated they are and more committed to academic excellence.”

Claim: Incorporating the framework of critical race theory into curriculum can improve students’ critical thinking skills

This claim suggests that students who interact with CRT's framework develop critical thinking skills through the exercise of analyzing, critiquing, and engaging with complex historical concepts.

• Tanji Reed Marshall, director of p-12 practice for The Education Trust, contended, “Educators use this framework to deepen students’ critical thinking skills by asking them to probe the singularity of the perspectives being advanced in our history. Students ask questions about missing voices; look under our historical hoods, so to speak, and challenge the power dynamics at play when events are slanted toward an Eurocentric point of view. Educators have the opportunity to build students analytical, evaluative, and critiquing skills in ways that go beyond just learning the basics. Too often, students are taught history that is devoid of its impact on Indigenous communities, formerly enslaved communities, and other communities of color. And they are fed a steady diet of factoids without the opportunity to consider the far-reaching implications on current events.”

• Lynn Jennings, senior director of national and state partnerships for The Education Trust, argued, “Every student in the United States deserves a rich and complete education that helps them understand the story of their country and how their families are part of that story. This learning helps students digest current events in the context of history, develop critical thinking skills, and distinguish truth from falsity. It helps them recognize the big patterns in society and lets them make judgments about whether America’s struggle for democracy has been successful or has been hobbled by stubborn systems of racism and oppression.”

Claim: Having discussions about race through the lens of critical race theory is beneficial to minority students

This claim suggests that minority students benefit from discussing their lived experiences and the acknowledgement of the effects of what CRT's supporters call systemic racism on their lives.

• Professor Gloria Ladson-Billings contended, “CRT suggests that current instructional strategies presume that African American students are deficient. As a consequence, classroom teachers are engaged in a never-ending quest for ‘the right strategy or technique’ to deal with (read : control) ‘at-risk’ (read : African American) students. Cast in a language of failure, instructional approaches for African American students typically involve some aspect of remediation. This race-neutral perspective purports to see deficiency as an individual phenomenon. Thus, instruction is conceived as a generic set of teaching skills that should work for all students. When these strategies or skills fail to achieve desired results, the students, not the techniques, are found to be lacking. Fortunately, new research efforts are rejecting deficit models and investigating and affirming the integrity of effective teachers of African American students. This scholarship underscores the teachers’ understanding of the saliency of race in education and the society, and it underscores the need to make racism explicit so that students can recognize and struggle against this particular form of oppression.”

• Mark McCormick, deputy executive director of the ACLU of Kansas, argued, “We need honesty in education. Administrators and legislators taking action predicated on the fears of the white majority, without regard for its impact on Black children, fail all children. We must examine the full scope of the systems that created the wide swath of racial hurt in the first place. Or we’ll never find relief from the centuries-old reckoning still rattling in our collective gut.”

• Chauncey Devega argued, “White parents can afford to damage their children with lies and fantasies about the realities of racism and the color line. White privilege is a system of power and belief, one that is perpetuated and sustained by such actions. But, those of us who are responsible for nurturing and raising black and brown kids are not allowed to commit such an act of parental malpractice because the consequences can mean life or death for our children. Unfortunately, to love and protect African-American, Latino, First Nations, Asian, and other black and brown children often means robbing them of their racial innocence. Alas, this is a tough but necessary calculation. It is also one that has been made for centuries by the parents of black and brown children in the United States … and will likely continue for the foreseeable future.”

• Valerie Strauss contended, “The modus operandi to close the educational gap is an urgency for achievement so severe that it does not leave room to address students’ humanity. In schools where teachers call children scholars all day, it is easy to forget they are humans who have to live in a world outside the school walls. In a school where the staff does not look like the children it teaches, it is easy to avoid conversations about race. Many schools choose silence when police brutality reduces black people to hashtags. This is not without consequence to children. Too many urban schools, populated by an overwhelming number of white teachers, simply do not have enough people in leadership who can speak from an authentic place about race. A person who has only ever lived in the eye of a tornado cannot easily talk about the damage one leaves. The silence that follows has lasting effects on minority staff members and the children that education reform is under-serving. This silence creates a physical discomfort, an emotional chasm that is empty and full at the same time. Teachers, with the best intentions, sell children on the lie that striving for college will change their lives. Teachers do a poor job telling black and brown children about the world that succeeds in stealing their lives and then excuse the theft as a natural disaster.”

• Strauss continued, “It’s never too late to change our mindsets about what children need to hear us say to them. We need a decolonization of schools and minds. When a school offers little more than WASP values and college preparedness, the school is not educating the whole child. A school cannot ignore reality for the sake of political correctness. Teachers need guidance on how to communicate world events to the students who deal with these issues when the final bell rings. School leadership, no matter the ethnic makeup, must be fearless in how it navigates racial and social climates. Many schools are continuing to under-serve these students by choosing to ignore the societal issues that singularly affect minorities. We have to be brave enough to tackle the uncomfortable problems with the children who will one day grow up to change the world. Otherwise, we are no more than cowardly hypocrites.”

• Reporter Char Adams argued, “‘Race shouldn’t just be taught at home with families. It should be taught in school because we come to school to learn and learning about yourself is a part of the school experience,’ said one student, 16-year-old Kerry Santa Cruz. ‘It’s important for kids, especially Black kids, to learn about race so they can understand who they are. So they don’t end up hating themselves for being Black. Education is good.’”

• Author David Stovall wrote about his experience teaching a course centered in CRT to high school students. Stovall posited, “Through this course, the stories of students of color in high school were legitimated as they engaged with viewpoints that challenged those of the status quo. The legitimation of students’ stories is an example of counterstory. Counterstory, as enacted in the course, enabled the participants take as the starting point for analysis the first-hand experiences of those who have intimate knowledge of racism in their lives.”

• Daniel G. Solorzano contended, “Taken individually, these comments are viewed by most People of Color as insults. However, many Whites see these statements differently and respond to People of Color with such retorts as ‘you're being too sensitive about race’ or ‘why does everything have to go back to race.’ In fact, Charles Lawrence (1987) has commented that through ‘selective perception, whites are unlikely to hear many of the inadvertent racial slights that are made in their presence’ (pp. 340-341). Similarly, Richard Delgado (1988) has stated that ‘White people rarely see acts of blatant racism, while minority people experience them all the time’ (p. 407). In dealing with racial stereotypes in our teacher education classrooms, we need to hear about, discuss, and analyze those racial experiences that People of Color and Whites encounter in their public and private worlds. Not only do we need to discuss the racial macroaggressions such as public or overt racial stereotypes, attitudes, and behaviors, but we also need to listen, understand, and analyze the racial micro aggressions, those ‘subtle, stunning, often automatic, and non-verbal exchanges which are 'put downs' of Blacks by offenders’ (Pierce, 1978, p. 66).”

Claim: Schools need to teach students about racial inequality

This claim suggests that educating students on racial inequality through the lens of CRT can equip them to acknowledge, recognize, and respond to racism.

• Professor Matthew Lynch argued, “The theory works to incorporate the contributions of people of color into the history textbooks so that they can be recognized and given their due. In addition to that, it strives to emphasize that racism is present everywhere and an ongoing crisis. By banning the teaching of CRT in K-12 schools, only those who attend higher education will have an opportunity to be taught the theory, which will be detrimental to those who do not pursue higher education. This will have serious implications for students of color who are exposed to racism in one way or another in their life. They should know how to fend for themselves, and CRT gives them that ability. Students who are taught CRT early on in their lives grasp it better and fight against racism and relevant discriminatory practices that they see or experience. CRT also had a significant role in the Civil Rights Movement, which is a testament to its importance and impact. Therefore, CRT is very useful to systematically introduce the complex history of the U.S. to the current generation.”

• Olivia B. Waxman, staff writer for TIME, contended, “Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, finds the idea that classroom explorations of racism are divisive to be ironic. ‘If we’re not teaching students that the reason why racial inequity exists is because of racism, then what are they going to conclude as to why racial inequity exists? They’re going to conclude that it must be because those Black people must have less because they are less,’ Kendi says. ‘That’s the only other conclusion. Not teaching our kids about racism is actually divisive.’”

• The Brookings Institute Senior Fellow William H. Frey argued, “One impact [of banning diversity education] will be to block new diverse generations from understanding the racially discriminatory forces that shaped current racial inequalities. As Brownstein noted: ‘Though the measures have been promoted mostly as a defensive tool (to prevent white students from feeling guilty), many see them in an equally important offensive goal: discouraging the growing number of nonwhite students, as they reach voting age, from viewing systemic discrimination as a problem that public policy should address.’ This is especially problematic for a nation that is rapidly aging and increasingly reliant on future generations of diverse youth. These future generations need to learn how and why America’s current sharp racial and ethnic divides came into being. This will put them in a position to offer solutions that will contribute to both their own well-being and that of the older generations that will become increasingly dependent on them.”

• David Stovall shared his experiences teaching a high school course on CRT. Stovall posited, “To put CRT at the forefront, I grounded the course in the tenets of critical race theory outlined by Solorzano and Villalpando (1997). These include (1) the centrality of racism, (2) the challenge to dominant ideology, (3) the commitment to social justice, (4) the importance of experiential knowledge, and (5) the use of an interdisciplinary perspective (p. 213). Placing CRT in the forefront allowed the class to deal with race as central to our endeavors. While discussing the tenets, my class and I were able to unpack their meanings. One that resonated with the students was the assertion of the importance of the experiential knowledge of persons of color. This made a direct connection to their expertise as persons who have intimately experienced racism and observed its effects. Students appreciated being able to speak freely about race without ridicule. In addition, we examined the interdisciplinary nature of CRT as we entered conversations about how sociology, philosophy, legal theory and educational theory could interact to inform our ideas about race and racism.”

• Tanji Reed Marshall argued, “Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about the danger of a single story; the lens of critical race theory gives educators the tools they need to help students disrupt the single story and build the very academic skills colleges and employers require. Shutting off access to current events as means of ensuring students will only see America through rose-colored glasses is not only historically inaccurate, it is irresponsible and will jeopardize students’ ability to function in a global society and compete with students whose states allow and expect their students to walk away from 13 years of formal schooling with broad deep knowledge about who we are as a country. Our nation will never move forward with legislators using their power to emotionally protect one group of students while they intellectually disenfranchise them all.”

• Journalist Nathan J. Robinson argued, “At the core of CRT, then, we have some important, if debatable, claims about the way that race functions in American life. Because CRT comes out of legal scholarship, a lot of its core texts focus on the way that racial inequality is reproduced through law, even when the law is ostensibly silent on racial questions. Is this set of ideas particularly pernicious or outrageous? No. They are plainly ideas worth teaching people about and discussing. That does not mean they are beyond criticism; a portion of Delgado and Stefancic’s book is devoted to laying out criticisms of CRT, offering responses to those criticisms, and encouraging readers to consider and evaluate the criticisms carefully. This is how it should be. We teach about ideas; we discuss them. Where the ideas are correct, we accept them, and where they are not, we critique and improve them. What we do not do is ban them from being discussed. (Yes, I believe the same about right-wing ideas.)”

• Professor Kafi D. Kumasi posited, “By offering this detailed account of how CRT can be used to frame classroom learning, Stovall helps debunk the popular conception that CRT scholarship lacks transferability to real educational settings. In the first section, ‘From Theory to Praxis in a Secondary Classroom,’ Stovall candidly walks the reader through the conceptual/planning stages of the course, where his stated goal is ‘to teach a class that examined the intersections of race and power though analysis of images in the media’ (2006, 235). In the section on ‘CRT in the Classroom,’ Stovall shares highlights of how students responded to the various writing prompts and assignments that were given in class. Throughout the text, Stovall weaves a discussion of the various CRT constructs that informed his pedagogical choices and strategies. He concludes that the course provided a space where the voices and the racialized experiences of students of color were validated. He reaffirms what every critical educator knows, that the work of social justice education is ‘messy’ and low on public recognition but is nonetheless imperative for real social change.”

Claim: Teaching about racism through the lens of critical race theory in schools highlights the resilience of people of color throughout history

This claim suggests that the lens of CRT is needed to teach students about the resilience of people of color throughout American history and offer a deeper understanding of history.

• Journalist Ruth Terry asserted, “Teaching the most shameful aspects of our nation’s history through a critical race lens also opens opportunities to showcase Black and Brown resistance to the White supremacist structures and systems that the legal theory was originally established to critique. ‘It’s important to focus on agency, resilience, and joy, and not just violence and oppression,’ says Hoover. She offers the following example: ‘We don’t do a good enough job of telling [students] the many ways enslaved people did resist. They worked slow, feigned sickness, they ran away for short times, they broke tools, they learned to read and write, grew vegetables to feed their families, maximized skills to generate income away from the enslavers. Slavery was much more complex than the abbreviated storyline included in many state standards.’”

Claim: The framework of critical race theory is foundational to teaching American history

This claim suggests that the beliefs associated with CRT are needed in schools to teach children the most complete and accurate account of history.

• Matthew Lynch asserted, “The American youth needs to know about their history and how it has shaped their society. This is important because racism and the relevant discrimination practices can only be uprooted from American society once the origin of the problem is identified. As mentioned earlier, CRT is a way of understanding how and why racism and its aspects, including White supremacy, anti-Blackness, and other types of racialized inequality, are rooted in legal practice, policy, and social institutions (Alvarez, 2021).”

• Olivia B. Waxman argued, “It’s a debate between people who think children shouldn’t be burdened with the past, and those who want kids to learn how the legacy of that past shapes American society today. Is our national history merely a tool to inspire patriotism, or is it, as historians argue, a valuable lesson in the good, the bad and the ugly? As this new front in the culture wars shows, our understanding of the past is a key factor in how we envision our future.”

• Terry Gross, host of NPR's Fresh Air argued, “In other words, the [North Dakota] law now is saying that whenever a teacher talks about racism, they may only describe it as a product of an individual's own biases or prejudices. They cannot describe it — even when the facts command them to — as something more endemic or embedded within American society. It's a way essentially of preventing teachers, I think, from being honest about a lot of the uglier sides of American history and contemporary society.”

• Political commentators Kmele Foster and David French, professor Jason Stanley, and author Thomas Chatterton Williams argued, “The laws differ in some respects but generally agree on blocking any teaching that would lead students to feel discomfort, guilt or anguish because of one’s race or ancestry, as well as restricting teaching that subsequent generations have any kind of historical responsibility for actions of previous generations. They attempt various carve-outs for the impartial teaching of the history of oppression of groups. But it’s hard to see how these attempts are at all consistent with demands to avoid discomfort. These measures would, by way of comparison, make Germany’s uncompromising and successful approach to teaching about the Holocaust illegal, as part of its goal is to infuse them with some sense of the weight of the past and (famously) lead many German students to feel anguish about their ancestry. Indeed, the very act of learning history in a free and multiethnic society is inescapably fraught. Any accurate teaching of any country’s history could make some of its citizens feel uncomfortable (or even guilty) about the past. To deny this necessary consequence of education is, to quote W.E.B. Du Bois, to transform ‘history into propaganda.’ What’s more, these laws even make it difficult to teach U.S. history in a way that would reveal well-documented ways in which past policy decisions, like redlining, have contributed to present-day racial wealth gaps. An education of this sort would be negligent, creating ignorant citizens who are unable to understand, for instance, the case for reparations — or the case against them.”

• Rashawn Ray and Alexandra Gibbons of The Brookings Institution argued, “The approach of some Republican-led state legislatures is a method for continuing to roll back racial progress regarding everything from voting rights to police reform. This is a horrible idea and does an injustice to our kids. Laws forbidding any teacher or lesson from mentioning race/racism, and even gender/sexism, would put a chilling effect on what educators are willing to discuss in the classroom and provide cover for those who are not comfortable hearing or telling the truth about the history and state of race relations in the United States. Ironically, ‘making laws outlawing critical race theory confirms the point that racism is embedded in the law,’ as sociologist Victor Ray noted.”

• Stephen Sawchuk contended, “As English teacher Mike Stein told Chalkbeat Tennessee about the new law: ‘History teachers can not adequately teach about the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement. English teachers will have to avoid teaching almost any text by an African American author because many of them mention racism to various extents.’ The laws could also become a tool to attack other pieces of the curriculum, including ethnic studies and ‘action civics’—an approach to civics education that asks students to research local civic problems and propose solutions.”

• Leila Rafei and Eva Lopez of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) contended, “Learning about dynamics of race and gender is an integral part of any student’s education and necessary to understand U.S. history.”

• The ACLU South Dakota Advocacy Manager Jett Jonelis contended, “Teaching students about American history without examining its contradictions and failures leaves students ignorant of their country’s full story. Having the opportunity to learn and talk about the history and cultures of Indigenous communities, people of color, LGBTQ+ and Two Spirit people, and other marginalized communities benefits all students. When you attempt to censor the truth, you open the door to dangerous false narratives about the past and can create education environments that are inequitable, particularly for students of color. The ability to discuss and debate ideas, even those that some find uncomfortable, is a crucial part of our democracy.”

Claim: The framework of critical race theory is needed to teach students about current events

This claim suggests that school curricula should incorporate the lens of CRT so students can understand the racial implications of current events.

• Kalyn Belsha, Matt Barnum, and Marta W. Aldrich, reporters for Chalkbeat, argued, “Skikila Smith, who teaches literature at a high school in Knoxville, Tennessee, says she can’t teach the story of racial injustice in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ without addressing her students’ questions about George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and other Black Americans killed by police or vigilantes in recent years. ‘If a student asks, I’m not going to shy away from answering,’ said Smith, who is Black, like most of her students. ‘I’m not going to lie when they start making connections and asking why people don’t believe a Black person over the lies of someone who does not look like them. My students are not dumb.’”

• Cassie Walker Burke and Samantha Smylie, reporters for Chalkbeat Chicago argued, “Early in the week, schools chief Janice Jackson called on the city’s educators to initiate discussions about race and police brutality with students. On Monday evening, Chicago Public Schools published an 11-page guide, ‘Say Their Names,’ about race, Black Lives Matter, and the impact of traumatic events on children. It appears to be among the most comprehensive toolkits assembled by a large school district. ‘It’s important we have an open dialogue about race and its impact on this country, and we have never shied away from that as a school system,’ Jackson said. ‘Our students are smart, they know what they see, they can draw their own conclusions, and teachers are suited to have those discussions.’”

• Leila Rafei and Eva Lopez with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) posited, “Most of the time, my students are the ones who want to talk about race and gender, because these are the issues they deal with in their everyday lives. It helps them make sense of what they witness when they step outside school, like police brutality, mass incarceration, and the school-to-prison pipeline. It also helps them understand themselves, their communities, and each other.”

• Mica Pollock et al. argued, “The conflict campaign in total seeks to expose, restrict, ban, ‘abolish,’ censor, and control a wide set of school conversations on race and inclusion. These restrictions threaten to prevent students and educators from engaging and grappling with difficult historical facts, current events, complex opportunity barriers, real biases, marginalized communities’ voices, and possible collective improvements in our shared schools and country. Restriction efforts also threaten to block opportunities for students of color and White students to discuss how they might join together to ensure that all are included and valued in our society and treated with dignity and respect.”

Claim: Institutions of higher education need to use the critical race theory framework to guide a reduction of racial disparities on campuses

This claim suggests that institutions of higher education should examine their curricula and programming through the lens of CRT to dismantle racial inequalities on college campuses.

• Scholar Payne Hiraldo contended, “The lack of inclusivity in the academic curriculum (Ladson-Billings, 1998) and student development theory used by student affairs professionals (Patton et al., 2007) supports the notion of colorblindness that works against dismantling social inequities. In order to take a closer step towards eradicating racism on college campuses, student and academic affairs need to incorporate dialogues around race throughout the curriculum and student activities (Patton et al.). Institutions of higher education must recognize and work toward dismantling colorblind policies (Iverson, 2007).”

• Hiraldo continued, “Patton et al. (2007) recommended incorporating critical race perspectives in daily practices within education. Doing so brings awareness about the role of race in producing racial inequities. As a result, faculty, student affairs professionals, and institutional administrators should be aware of the rooted racism in educational settings and acknowledge the systemic complexities that further disadvantage students of color (DeCuir & Dixson, 2004; Patton et al.). Reflecting on how campus leaders incorporate racial perspectives in the academy through the construction of the curriculum, diversity initiatives, and institutional policies is essential to the progress of higher education’s relationship with racial equality.”

Argument: Restricting teaching on topics of race and racism negatively affects students and school

This argument posits that efforts to restrict teaching about race and racism negatively affect students and prevent an accurate teaching of history. The argument also suggests political pressure to ban racial material in schools comes from non-parent demographics and restricts free speech.

Claim: Limiting teaching around race and racism sanitizes American history

This claim suggests that policies limiting teaching on topics of race and racism prevent students from learning about people of color and their contributions to American history and disadvantages in society.

• Jasmine Geonzon and Madeleine Davison, researchers at Media Matters posited, “Anti-CRT advocates instead push for children to be miseducated by a whitewashed version of history that ignores systemic racism and the culturally diverse history of the country, including contributions of Black people and other people of color. The push against CRT has also converged with anti-LGBTQ movements, with many of the same tactics used to attack LGBTQ inclusion and specifically target trans individuals.”

• Kalyn Belsha, Matt Barnum, and Martha W. Aldrich posited, “Talking about slavery is not prohibited by the Texas law, and its architects have insisted that the new laws would not limit such discussions. ‘I defy anyone to find one word of this bill that says we don’t teach the ugly parts of our history,’ Texas Sen. Bryan Hughes said in August. But the bill does ban the teaching that ‘slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to the authentic founding principles of the United States.’ That, alongside the vague requirement for objectivity, has steered teachers away from frank discussions of the past in ways that lawmakers claimed would not happen.”

• Terry Gross argued, “Whenever you discuss slavery, your teacher would have to essentially say, ‘These slaveholders were racist.’ The system that they were in, the laws that supported them, the economy that made that business profitable, you'd have to separate those institutional features and describe slavery purely as a product of individual bias, which does violence to the topic. It fails to educate students, and I think might discourage students from thinking critically about contemporary institutions and identifying whether or not they also might be guilty of systemic racism.”

• Mica Pollock et al. argued, “One White elementary school teacher from a majority students of color, rapidly changing, conservative suburban Texas district, noted that ‘Equity, MLK Jr, Snyder Act, anything discussing slavery, current events’ all felt targeted by state law. The teacher then indicated the local district’s role in interpreting this targeting: the broader advice given teachers locally was to ‘avoid any controversial issues,’ leading to colleagues ‘shying away’ altogether from more fraught U.S. history: ‘We were told verbally during a PowerPoint presentation with the district counsel that we should avoid any controversial issues and only teach the ‘facts’ of anything that might be divisive…. My colleagues are shying away from teaching anything in history or social studies that could be offensive.’”

Claim: Teaching students about racism does not mean having to choose between patriotism and teaching accurate history

Critics have argued that incorporating the lens of CRTT in schools will make students less patriotic. This claim suggests teaching students about racism will not make them less patriotic.

• University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana Dean of Education James Anderson contended, “What I would want everyone to understand is that we don’t have to make a choice between patriotism and teaching accurate history. It’s not one or the other. I think there’s a lot more patriotism connected to the truth about a society than to the pretense. And we have we have countless examples of this. For example, the African American soldiers that went off to fight in World War II, do you think they were unaware of slavery, unaware of racism? They came from many places in the South, and they couldn’t vote, couldn’t eat at lunch counters, went to segregated schools and hospitals. You think they fought less hard than the other soldiers? You think they were less committed because they knew a different truth? I mean, the notion that you can only develop patriotism by manufacturing, a history or manufacturing, a truth is a very, very false notion. People are more patriotic when they understand the society in which they live and are committed to making it a better society. That is a source of patriotism. This fear that somehow if people know about slavery, about Jim Crow, about the ways in which race has shaped our dominant social institution, that somehow, they’d be less patriotic — that is simply a false notion.”

Claim: Parents do not support banning racial content in schools; political pressure is coming from non-parent voters

This claim suggests that the reaction against racial content in schools primarily comes from non-parent voters. A majority of parents are not in favor of banning race-based curriculum in schools, according to this claim.

• The Brookings Institute Senior Fellow William H. Frey argued, “Surveys taken in Virginia, Florida, and Texas show underwhelming support for banning the teaching of racial history and diversity in public schools among most respondents, including parents. Moreover, a February nationwide CBS poll found that more than eight in 10 Americans oppose banning books that discuss race or slavery from schools, and more than six in 10 believe that teaching about race in America makes students understand what others went through. This is noteworthy because the demography of the nation’s school children and their parents is distinct from nonparent voters of the traditional Republican base—older white voters, especially those without college educations. Therefore, it is fair to say that the political strategy behind these laws, particularly in rapidly diversifying Republican states, is really intended to appeal to nonparent voters who are fearful of the nation’s changing demography.”

• Lauren Ziegler and Rebecca Winthrop with The Brookings Institute wrote, “An interesting finding about the CRT discussion compared to the other topics in our study is that it involves more than just parents. As we have already highlighted through examples above, many professionals and activists are also part of the conversation. This could be why the conversation skewed older and male when compared to the general education conversation (Figure 7). A much larger percentage of 35-to-44-year-olds and 45-to-54-year-olds were talking about CRT as compared to the general education conversation in our sample. Almost 70 percent of people talking about CRT were male, which is much higher than in the general conversation.”

Claim: Restricting race-based teaching is anti-free speech

This claim posits that legislation and executive orders that govern how teachers can discuss topics like race and gender identity in classrooms restrict free speech.

• American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Advocacy Manager Jett Jonelis argued, “Many will interpret a ban on critical race theory to mean a ban on discussing or raising issues of race or gender in the classroom at all. Preventing discussions like this is an affront to free speech, a value and a right that should be held in the highest regard. As a matter of fact, it’s our right. The First Amendment protects the right to share ideas, including the right of listeners to receive information and knowledge. Anything less is classroom censorship, pure and simple.”

• Jonathan Friedman and James Tager with PEN America posited, “These bills appear designed to chill academic and educational discussions and impose government dictates on teaching and learning. In short: They are educational gag orders. Collectively, these bills are illiberal in their attempt to legislate that certain ideas and concepts be out of bounds, even, in many cases, in college classrooms among adults. Their adoption demonstrates a disregard for academic freedom, liberal education, and the values of free speech and open inquiry that are enshrined in the First Amendment and that anchor a democratic society. Legislators who support these bills appear determined to use state power to exert ideological control over public educational institutions. Further, in seeking to silence race- or gender-based critiques of U.S. society and history that those behind them deem to be ‘divisive,’ these bills are likely to disproportionately affect the free speech rights of students, educators, and trainers who are women, people of color, and LGBTQ+. The bills’ vague and sweeping language means that they will be applied broadly and arbitrarily, threatening to effectively ban a wide swath of literature, curriculum, historical materials, and other media, and casting a chilling effect over how educators and educational institutions discharge their primary obligations. It must also be recognized that the movement behind these bills has brought a single-minded focus to bear on suppressing content and narratives by and about people of color specifically–something which cannot be separated from the role that race and racism still plays in our society and politics. As such, these bills not only pose a risk to the U.S. education system but also threaten to silence vital societal discourse on racism and sexism.”

Argument: Teachers should primarily decide what is taught in classrooms

This argument posits that parents and politicians should generally let teachers do their jobs and should not promote rules about how teachers can address CRT or talk about potentially controversial topics.

Claim: Topics like race and racism are too important to have parents influence the curriculum

This claim says that public school teachers and school officials should be insulated from political movements of parents because topics such as race and racism are too important to students’ education.

• The Washington Post Editorial Board argued, “Allowing one parent — or a group of parents — to bully, threaten and intimidate school officials into their way of thinking is not what our democracy is about. And it is not what learning should be about. It is chilling that a school administrator in Texas suggested that an opposing view of the Holocaust needed to be taught to comply with the state’s controversial law on curriculum content. Everyone — parents, teachers and school administrators, as well as politicians — needs to focus less on what books are being taught and more on giving students the skills to think critically and form their own judgments.”

• Professor Jack Schneider and journalist Jennifer Berkshire contended, “Given this frenzy, one might reasonably conclude that radicals are out to curtail the established rights that Americans have over the educational sphere. Yet what’s actually radical here is the assertion of parental powers that have never previously existed. This is not to say that parents should have no influence over how their children are taught. But common law and case law in the United States have long supported the idea that education should prepare young people to think for themselves, even if that runs counter to the wishes of parents. In the words of legal scholar Jeff Shulman, ‘This effort may well divide child from parent, not because socialist educators want to indoctrinate children, but because learning to think for oneself is what children do.’”

• Schneider and Berkshire continued, “Writing in the 1960s, historian Richard Hofstadter observed that conservatives felt that the country had been ‘taken away from them and their kind’ and that timeworn American virtues had been ‘eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals.’ In response, they took up what he called the ‘paranoid style’ — an approach to politics characterized by ‘heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.’ Published more than half a century ago, his essay could have been penned yesterday. The ‘paranoid style’ of politics is particularly useful as a mechanism for organizing opposition. And the Republicans employing it right now have two particular targets in mind. The first is the public education system, which hard-liners have long sought to undermine. At an annual cost of nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars, tuition-free, open-enrollment education represents one of the nation’s most substantial commitments to the public good. But well before Ronald Reagan’s failed effort to introduce vouchers in the 1980s, conservatives were making the case for a privatized system — one in which families, not taxpayers, would bear the cost of education, and governance would happen through the free market rather than democratic politics. In recent years, this vision has come roaring back. Conservative legislatures across the United States have introduced bills creating education savings accounts, private-school tuition tax credits and other forms of neo-vouchers that package old ideological wine in new bottles.”

Claim: Topics like race and racism are too important to have politicians influence the curriculum

This claim suggests that politicians should let teachers do their jobs and refrain from enacting legislation that interferes with the ability of teachers to talk about topics like race and racism.

• Professor Adam Laats argued, “For a full century now, conservative politicians have attacked teachers to score easy political points. This, despite the fact that teachers, as a group, tend to consider themselves ‘moderate’ (43 percent) or even ‘conservative’ (27 percent), and their political views have long tended to match those of their local communities. Nevertheless, scare tactics about subversive teachers have been too tempting for politicians to resist. But although targeting teachers might score a short-term payoff at the ballot box, those attacks have always harmed public schools by driving teachers away.”

• The Editors of Rethinking Schools contended, “‘The alphabet is abolitionist.’ This powerful statement comes from an 1867 Harper’s Weekly editorial rallying its mostly Northern readers to the fight for robust public education as part of the post-Civil War reconstruction of the South. It rightly rooted this struggle in the violent denial of literacy under the slavocracy. In that context, learning — or teaching others — to read and write was indeed abolitionist. The political project of white supremacy has always included attacks on education and those attacks continue in 2021. Today’s Republican Party is not so bold as to suggest educators be prohibited from teaching their pupils to read the alphabet, only that we be prohibited from teaching them to read the world.”

• Author Amanda Marcotte argued, “It is important to note that the fabricated fury over ‘critical race theory’ is a cleverly constructed right-wing troll. Liberals who want to respond with a quick, easily digested rebuttal are instead boxed into a frustrating corner. Because pointing out that critical race theory is not being taught in public schools is a trap, as it could be construed to imply that there’s something wrong with critical race theory. And any straightforward defense of critical race theory implies that schoolchildren are somehow expected to understand graduate school-level academic theories. But in fact, the real issue at hand is that conservatives don’t want white kids to learn even the most basic truths about American history.”

• Adam Sanchez, an editor of Rethinking Schools and Teaching a People's History of Abolition and the Civil War, argued, “What Republican politicians pushing these bills want taught is the version of history found in the corporate textbooks shaped by Texan conservatives, where the three-fifths clause is characterized as a ‘compromise’ among the founding fathers (about half of whom enslaved people), where Martin Luther King Jr. is played on a loop repeating his famous line about judging people based on ‘the content of their character,’ and where debates about unequal and segregated schools ended decades ago. This is the educational equivalent of the ‘Big Lie’ that Trump won the election, occasioning and the wave of voter suppression laws promoted by the same political forces.”

• Journalist Bryan Anderson argued, “Kimberlé Crenshaw, executive director of the African American Policy Forum, was among those who helped popularize critical race theory in the 1970s and 1980s as a response to what she and others felt was a lack of progress following passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. She said Republicans are twisting the concept to inflame racial tensions and motivate their base of mostly white supporters. ‘This is a 2022 strategy to weaponize white insecurity, to mobilize ideas that have been mobilized again and again throughout history, using a concept or set of ideas that they can convince people is the new boogeyman,’ Crenshaw said.”

• Lauren Ziegler and Rebecca Winthrop with The Brookings Institute argued, “Beyond the discussion on social media, the debate has been picked up and covered amply by journalist and media organizations. For example, in a span of just three and half months, Fox News mentioned CRT 1,900 times. This may be why a national survey from Learning Heroes found that in 2021, 40 percent of parents worry a lot about ‘having politicians who are not educators making decisions about what students learn in the classroom.’”

See also

• Overview of trends in K-12 curricula development
• Public education in the United States
• Higher education in the United States
• Education policy in the United States

External links

• Search Google News for this topic

Footnotes

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