CRT isn't a racist ideology that proclaims all whites to have privileged oppressors. CRT is not taught at public schools.However, over the last nine months, conservative activists have labeled all race reform efforts for education and employment, first slowly in right wing media conversation, and now quickly in mainstream newspapers. This is a disinformation campaign to rally disaffected working-class and middle-class white people against progressive changes.It is easy to understand CRT and not the cartoonish image of reverse racism its critics portray. It is also a good way to understand why the anti-it campaign has been so successful.CRT is the real-world description of the varied work of a few scholars who examine the flaws of traditional civil rights approaches to understanding racial power and changing it in American society. This complex critique would not fit into a K-12 curriculum. The ideas are difficult even for law students. We find it hard to explain. There is no set of simple, orthodox principles that we accept. Therefore, CRT cannot be taught to everyone. Teachers who are able to teach students such difficult and analytically complex ideas in public schools should be celebrated, not condemned.Our analysis has a common starting point: the 1960s and 1950s civil rights movements did not eliminate racial power. This movement ended the system of blatant segregation that was represented in the Whites Only signs and Colored signs. However, the old guard resistance to racial justice reform in many institutions in the 70s and 80s thwarted the progress made by the civil rights movement.As a first-year lawyer teacher in the 1980s, I was a member of the University of Virginia Law School admissions board. Since then, UVA has admitted a small number of Black students every year for about 15 years. My colleagues on the admissions committee were some of the same people who ran the school back when it was segregated. Although the rules had changed, they were still in control. They were still in control, decades after the formal desegregation.In every institution, the same story was unfolding. Although the Whites Only signs vanished, the racial power was still present in a multitude of social practices now formulated in the language race-neutrality. For example, the old guard administrators expressed concerns about standards and their ideas about them.In the 1980s, CRT was first defined by a new generation who faced this kind of racial power at the universities they attended and in law schools where they would go on to teach. We focused on the many ways that racial power was used in what we thought to be colorblind, as American constitution law accepted colorblindness. While we may have different beliefs and approaches, our common goal is to understand the subtler racial power structures, how they can often act as neutral institutions in society and how to reverse the injustices they cause.Traditional liberal thinking saw the problem with civil rights as the inability to implement the policy of racial inclusion sufficiently. Critically, Black students were not able to be admitted to mainstream institutions. They had to confront norms that organized what was being taught and how it was being taught, which were created by all-white whites. Even in knowledge in law or academia, there were or could be racial power dynamics. Instead of seeing racism as an irrational deviation of rationality, we explored how liberal categories such as reason and neutrality might be affected by history and struggle, which included racial power.Critical race theorists examine social practices. The law is a social procedure in terms of how it helps to maintain or construct the subordination of the Black population. Because colorblindness is not an ideal, being aware of race is the only way we can tell if the Black community's situation is improving. Colorblindness, however appealing it may sound to some, can lead to decision-makers believing that if they don't discriminate against racial groups in hiring or admissions, then racial power is no longer an issue in their social lives.A CRT view of police reform would therefore focus on historical relations between the community, police and law enforcement, rather than just on neutral enforcement of rules such as probable cause requirements. The idea of imposing race-neutral standards for reasonableness on police seems hollow when you consider the fact that white suburban police officers are kept in high-tech patrol vehicles patrolling Black neighborhoods. To counter the claim that market forces are responsible for the wealth disparities between Black and White America, a CRT perspective would also highlight the long history discrimination in employment, real estate, education, and healthcare that has shaped and continues to underpin the economy we have today.We also question the ways in which liberals have traditionally defended affirmative actions as an exception to a presumed race blind ideal of merit.People are uncomfortable asking difficult questions about shared values. This is understandable. CRT opponents seize on our criticism of the ideology behind colorblindness to accuse us of being divisive or, as Ted Cruz stated, racist. Colorblindness, however, is an empty ideal that serves to confirm its premises. If it is not possible to see the social effects of policies in terms racial, the disparate racial consequences of policies become invisible. Racialized violence in police departments disappears when there are no racial statistics on their interactions. If one does not look at the ZIP code results that are racialized, racial redlining can appear as simple risk-based pricing. Ending racial subordination requires that it be ended in its entirety, and not being defined away.Contrary to being racially divided, the critical portion of CRT holds there is no objective, neutral idea of merit that could explain America's wealth distribution, power distribution, and prestige. This unfairness applies to both whites and blacks, as well as all those whose places in the American hierarchy of life are supposedly legitimized by the professional classes.CRT can be used to understand the current cultural dynamics and racial dynamics. Because of the way traditional civil rights approaches to racial power have been interpreted, CRT is gaining popularity quickly. The 1960s civil rights revolution was institutionalized in American cultural understanding. Whites were taught to view racism as bad people who have racist ideas. The mainstream America became obsessed with the redneck Southern sheriff.This simplistic view of racial power resulted in a failure to recognize the systemic and subtle effects of American apartheid over many generations. If racism is about identifying bad actors, the traditional image suggests, then whites are naturally concerned that renewed attention to institutionalized racial powers will lead to them being blamed and shamed.It is understandable that CRT depictions by its opponents bear little resemblance with our actual work and ideas. The point of those seeking to ban CRT, as they do in affirmative action and the invocations of Willie Horton during the 1980s, is not to challenge our vision of racial injustice or our social critique. Instead, it is to tap into the dependable source of racial anxiety amongst whites. This strategy has been successful for as long as anyone can remember. CRT is the soft target of the campaign today.Multiracial and multigenerational popular mobilization that followed the killing of George Floyd last year is a sign of how the old strategy is losing its luster. It is false that CRT is being taught to high school students. However, many school administrators and teachers across the country were motivated by George Floyd's death to incorporate racial justice themes into their schools.It is important to encourage this basic effort to tell truths-both the inspiring and the ugly-about American history, government, and society. Many readers will be able to recall the distorted and unrealistic views of American history and civics that have dominated American schools for many generations. Teachers and school administrators are working to change this. They have a better understanding of our history and are more open about the problems that need fixing. It is worth noting that the real target right now isn't critical race theory, but the small and long-awaited change being made by school administrators and teachers. Although they may not have heard of CRT before, they intuitively know why it exists and rightfully recognize the absurdity in the conservative charge that teaching racism is racist.
