Invoking
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
in mid-December, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced new legislation
that allows parents to sue schools for teaching critical race theory.
“You think about what MLK stood for. He said he didn’t
want people judged on the color of their skin, but on the content of
their character,” said DeSantis, a political ringleader in the
latest chapter of the United States’ culture war. In using a
quote from Dr. King to justify an attack on curricula that uplifts
racial justice, the Republican governor inadvertently created a
strong case for why critical thinking on the history of race and
racism in the U.S. is necessary.
History
professor Robin D. G. Kelley
is all too familiar with the sort of contradictory statements like
those DeSantis spouted. Kelley, who is the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair
in U.S. History at the University of California, Los Angeles,
explains that he “came into the profession at the height of a
battleground over history, in the 1980s, with the war on political
correctness.” And although he’s lived through decades of
conservative-led attacks, like those by DeSantis, he describes the
2020s as “dangerous times.”
The
Origins of CRT
Kelley
sees right-wing attacks on CRT—what he considers an umbrella
term for the teaching of “any kind of revisionist or
multicultural history”—as a measure of the success
communities of color and progressive parents and teachers have had
after pushing for years to ensure that educational curricula reflect
racially and ethnically diverse classrooms.
The
most recent movement for such education can be traced to the Freedom
Schools
of the 1960s, which, in the words of educators Deborah Menkart and
Jenice L. View, “were intended to counter the ‘sharecropper
education’ received by so many African Americans and poor
whites.” In a civil rights history lesson created for Teaching
for Change,
Menkart and View explained that the education offered in nearly 40
such schools centered on “a progressive curriculum …
designed to prepare disenfranchised African Americans to become
active political actors on their own behalf.” In 1968, after
months of pressure from student activists, San
Francisco State Universityestablished
the first College of Ethnic Studies in the U.S.
A
movement to offer ethnic studies courses in public schools, including
colleges and universities, has gained traction nationwide. Such
education is now standard fare as part of required college courses.
California remains on the cutting edge of multicultural education,
becoming the first state in the nation, in October 2021, to require
high schoolers to enroll in ethnic studies courses
in order to graduate.
Leading
African American scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at
UCLA, coined the term “critical race theory” and
co-edited the book of the same name, which published in 1996, to
define race as a social construct and provide a framework for
understanding the way it shapes public policy. Crenshaw explained in
a New
York Times
article that CRT, originally used by academics
and social scientists
to analyze educational inequities, “is a way of seeing,
attending to, accounting for, tracing and analyzing the ways that
race is produced … the ways that racial inequality is
facilitated, and the ways that our history has created these
inequalities that now can be almost effortlessly reproduced unless we
attend to the existence of these inequalities.”
Understanding
the Attacks on CRT
Critical
race theory is precisely the sort of nuanced educational lens that
Crenshaw, Kelley, and others use in their courses and that has White
supremacist forces up in arms. Attacks against CRT are taking the
form of multi-pronged legislative
restrictions and even bans,
as well as firings
of teachers
accused of teaching biased histories.
Kelley
sees conservatives like DeSantis working relentlessly to eliminate
any education that actually reckons with the history of American
slavery, the genocide of Indigenous peoples and dispossession of
their lands, sexism and patriarchy, and gender and gender identity.
Reflecting again on the ’80s, he says the attacks on ethnic
studies, culture, and race didn’t only come from the Right. “In
fact,” he says, they also came from “liberals, from the
Left,” and from those saying “we’re not paying
enough attention to class [struggles].”
Kelley
cites “classic liberal fatigue” against ongoing demands
for racial justice, which he encapsulates in responses such as, “We
already gave you some money, we already gave you this legislation,
what else do you want to ask for? Why are you criticizing us?”
A
case in point about how liberal figures are joining the right-wing
war on CRT is a new venture called the University
of Austin,
Texas, created by a group of public figures led by former New
York Timeswriter
Bari Weiss. Weiss, in an op-ed
in the Times,
cited unpopular ideas, such as “Identity politics is a toxic
ideology that is tearing American society apart.” She expressed
dismay that such an opinion—generally considered a racist
one—is shunned by many academics.
To
counter what Weiss considers censorship, UATX’s founders say
they are devoted to “the unfettered pursuit of truth” and
are promoting a curriculum that will include the “Forbidden
Courses”
centering on “the most provocative questions that often lead to
censorship or self-censorship in many universities.”
As
if to underscore Kelley’s warning about liberals joining the
right-wing culture war, the nascent university’s board
of advisors
includes figures like Lawrence Summers, former U.S. treasury
secretary and former President Barack Obama’s economic adviser,
who is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the left-leaning Center
for American Progress.
A
Counter to the Moneyed Interests Backing CRT Attacks
Kelley
sees a difference between earlier battles over political correctness
and those centered on CRT today. “The Right has far more
political weapons. They are actually engaged in a kind of McCarthyite
attack on school teachers, the academy, on students, on families, and
passing legislation on what’s called critical race theory,”
he says.
Right-wing
narratives have cast the backlash against CRT as a grassroots
effort
led by parents concerned about bias in their children’s
education. But secretive and powerful moneyed interests are at work
behind the scenes. The watchdog group Open
Secretsrecently
exposed how right-wing organizations, like the Concord Fund, are part
of “a network of established dark money groups funded by secret
donors … stoking the purportedly ‘organic’
anti-CRT sentiment.”
Additionally,
CNBC reporter Brian Schwartz exposed
how “business executives and wealthy Republican donors helped
fund attacks” on CRT and that it is expected to be a
centerpiece of the GOP’s campaign ahead of the 2022 midterm
elections.
In
contrast to the politically formidable and well-funded forces arrayed
in opposition to CRT, the Marguerite
Casey Foundation
each year gives out unrestricted funds to prominent thinkers, like
Kelley, to counter “the limited financial resources and
research constraints frequently faced by scholars whose work supports
social movements.”
The
Foundation chose six scholars whom it describes
as doing “leading research in critical fields.” Those
include abolition and Black, Latino, feminist, queer, radical, and
anti-colonialist studies, which are precisely the fields that are
anathema to anti-CRT forces.
Kelley,
who was named one of the foundation’s 2021 Freedom Scholars,
agrees that such funding can help level the playing field for
academics working to expand educational curricula that challenge
White supremacist and patriarchal histories.
Going
beyond defensive countermeasures against the right-wing attacks on
CRT, such awards can help fund the study of histories of social
justice movements that are thriving. “We’re beginning to
break through the narrative of civil rights begets Black Power,
[which] begets radical feminism,” says Kelley, citing
grassroots change-making groups that have been active over the past
50 years through today and that have not gotten enough attention,
such as the Third
World Women’s Alliance,
the Boggs
Center,
the Combahee
River Collective,
The
Red Nation,
and INCITE!
Women of Color Against Violence.
“Just in the last two decades, we’re seeing so many
amazing movements whose history is being written as we speak,”
says Kelley.
He
is heartened by what he calls “new scholarship” that is
“thinking transnationally, thinking globally, and moving away
from a focus on mostly [White] male leadership and thinkers,”
giving way instead to the “political and intellectual work of
those who have a different vision of the future.”
This
article was produced by Economy
for All,
a
project of the Independent Media Institute