Legal scholars including Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado and Mari Matsuda wanted to understand why civil rights laws hadn't ended racial inequality. Their answer was that racism is built into legal and social structures, so rules that look neutral can still produce racist outcomes. The first workshop under the name was held in 1989 in Madison, Wisconsin. Crenshaw's idea of intersectionality came out of this work.
Critical race theory doesn't say that every white person is racist, but that racism is a part of everyday life for people of color, and it asks how racial bias shapes both our laws and our unconscious responses. Its themes include institutional racism, microaggressions, white privilege and reparations (JSTOR). It has shaped a lot of how I approach this newsletter.
But since 2020, the term has been used as a label for almost any teaching about race. In September 2020, a federal order restricted diversity trainings in government agencies. From 2021 onward, hundreds of state and local measures were introduced to limit teaching about race (UCLA CRT Forward). In 2022, a South Carolina school board banned critical race theory from classrooms while admitting it had never been taught there (MSN).
The confusion is intentional. Christopher Rufo, the activist who led the campaign, said of the term, "We have successfully frozen their brand" (Salon). Meanwhile, children start noticing race as early as age 3 (CHOC). So these bans keep kids from learning the history that explains what they already see.
Common questions
Is critical race theory taught in K-12 schools?
Rarely. It's a framework from law schools and is mostly taught in college and graduate programs. What many bans target is any lesson about race or racism, which is much broader than critical race theory itself.
Who created critical race theory?
Legal scholars including Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado and Mari Matsuda developed it in the 1970s and 1980s. Bell is often called its founder.
Does critical race theory say white people are bad?
No. It looks at how laws and institutions produce racial inequality, not at the character of individual white people. Its focus is on systems.