Executive Summary:
Recent education conflicts have pitted parents and activists against school boards and administrations. Protestors have accused school districts of grounding K-12 schooling in Critical Race Theory (CRT), teaching anti-Western, anti-American history and civics, and dividing people into oppressors (whites) and oppressed (minorities). But CRT defenders say that CRT is an academic field, taught in law schools, and not what protestors say it is. This backgrounder
covers the main principles of CRT as expressed by its scholars.
CRT scholars have explicitly disparaged the notion of colorblindness and equal treatment under the law. Instead, CRT emphasizes the disparate impact of law and policy. Generally held CRT principles include the following:
- That disparities in racial outcomes are proof of systemic racism.
- That systemic racism doesn’t require racist attitudes or actions, only that whites benefit from a policy or action.
- That equal treatment and colorblindness are social fictions.
- That progress in civil rights only occurs when civil rights converge with the interests of white elites. Such progress has reversed, because the interests of whites and nonwhites increasingly diverge.
- That “truth” is the manifestation of the dominant white narrative. Persons of color hold counternarratives that should be given equal space.
This backgrounder speculates on what applied CRT would look like. Reducing systemic racism in education (i.e., applied education CRT) would include, by implication: moving funds, resources, and personnel away from majority white districts; dropping testing as an assessment; and ultimately, race-norming test results.
Finally, reducing systemic racism means CRT activists would work towards overturning Supreme Court precedents and bring back quotas in education, contracting, employment, and other areas. CRT as an academic subfield in law schools has the potential to produce future lawyers, law professors, judges, and a sympathetic Supreme Court that could accomplish this CRT defenders are right, to the extent that CRT is not the catch-all category covering every multiculturalist-diversity-inclusion-antiracist initiative. CRT in many ways is even more revolutionary, even though it is called a mere academic field.
See the full document below:
Related posts:
Threats to Democracy Come From the Left and the Right
TESTIMONY OF ROGER CLEGG, PRESIDENT AND GENERAL COUNSEL, CENTER FOR EQUAL OPPORTUNITY BEFORE THE U.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS REGARDING THE PROPOSED EMPLOYMENT NON-DISCRIMINATION ACTPoliticized external review panels as unguided “diversity” missiles: California university administrators remain ultra-slow learners
Disparate Impact Delenda Est