Critical Race Theory is a dog whistle issue to stir up white supremacy

"Slavery was real!"- Political conservatives have used Critical Race Theory (aka #DRT) with incredible effectiveness to cause anxiety, to get people angry, and then get them to the polls, says Rutgers University President Jonathan Holloway.

Critical Race Theory

Interesting Q&A with an expert published in NewJersey.com:

Rutgers' President reports to the Star-Ledger, "What’s all this buzz about critical race theory?"

A Republican just got himself elected governor of Virginia by vowing to ban the teaching of critical race theory. Yet most people don’t even know what that term means – including the folks who hyped it up.

We asked Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway, a leading scholar of Black history and the author of The Cause of Freedom. Below is an edited transcript of his conversation with Star-Ledger Editorial Board Member Julie O’Connor.

Q. What is critical race theory?

A. Critical race theory has its roots in a concept taught in law school. The idea is that racism is systemic: Housing policy and lending practices are prime examples of government-sanctioned actions that have led to exacerbating race-based inequalities for generations of Americans. Such policies have reinforced prejudice and disparities along racial lines for centuries, and continue to do so today.

Look at redlining. Banks drew red lines around certain areas where you couldn’t get mortgages, or you’d get horrible mortgages. If you look at where Black and Brown folks could live because of discriminatory housing practices, those were redlined districts.

Redlining was made illegal in 1968, but these practices have continued with shocking consistency to the present day with segregated housing, which determines where you go to school, and a system that depends on tax receipts, which makes for poorer schools. It has this snowball effect. So, if you bring the lens of critical race theory to this, you could say, there’s a whole structure around how people live their lives – literally, where they live – that has been articulated through racialized policies.

Q. How did this obscure subject become a (wrong-minded!) central issue on the right?

A. That is the question. When I started hearing, say, six months ago, some reference to critical race theory as a divisive issue, I was like, 'wait a second' – who outside of academia is talking about critical race theory? Since then, I’ve watched it used. And it’s what you’d call ‘dog whistle politics,’ where you use certain key words that get people worked up and define them in ways so stripped of context and nuance that it becomes bastardized. It’s no longer what critical race theory is. It has now become this tool. Political conservatives have used this with incredible effectiveness to cause anxiety, to get people angry, and then get them to the polls.

Q. Do you think the meaning of critical race theory has evolved? It also seems like a vague, catch-all term now for what some people view as the excesses of wokeness.

“I’ve never figured out what ‘critical race theory’ is, to be totally honest, after a year of talking about it,” Fox News’ Tucker Carlson recently admitted. So what is it, and why is it so important?

A. Yes, it has become that. Look at the language we’re using now, in terms of trying to describe ourselves and our country: ‘Excesses of wokeness.’ Wow, how did we get to this place?

Really serious ideas in higher education do eventually go down through k-12 spaces, that’s just called education. But talking about critical race theory in the k-12 space, that’s extremely rare. Frankly, it’s something one might find in very fancy, elite private schools. It’s like one of these things that’s being passed off as a threat, that doesn’t exist. That’s what’s so frustrating. Critical race theory has become a stand-in for anxiety, for frustration, for feelings of being left behind, whether real or imagined.

Q. Seven states have already outlawed teaching critical race theory, and 13 others are considering similar bills. Does that concern you?

A. Absolutely. And it’s not about outlawing critical race theory – the fact that legislatures are outlawing what can be taught, period, is extremely unsetting. The whole point of education is to discover and test new ideas and see what shakes out. Evolution was once declared illegal to be taught. Years ago, Arizona outlawed the teaching of ethnic studies in universities. Are you kidding me? It’s McCarthyism on a different topic: trumped-up anxieties over racial belonging or access to power along racial lines.

Q. In a CBS News survey in October, 62 percent of likely Virginia voters said 'school curriculums on race and history' were a major factor in their choice for governor – that’s a higher percentage than those who said taxes or mask-wearing, and it wasn’t far below crime or the economy. What do you make of that?

A. These attacks are working because they get to deep-seated anxieties about an individual’s place in society. There’s no doubt that people who have had a lot of unquestioned authority for a long time are now seeing that authority questioned. The mainstream is shifting, and certain ideas are not as revered as before.

Just in our lifetimes, the idea that people of the same gender could marry has gone from being absurd, to being weird, to being uncomfortable, to being, well, why is this an issue? That this happened within 20 years is astonishing.

But the fact that this stoking the flames of racial anxieties is happening yet again tells us that it gets to the roots of how this country was organized. Where those roots are threatened is where you see deep social anxiety. Do conservatives actually care about critical race theory? I don’t know, frankly. Are they aware of how manipulative they’re being? I would hazard a guess, and say yes.

Q. How do you think the Democrats should respond to these attacks over critical race theory? Should the Virginia election serve as a warning?

A. Oh, it’s absolutely a warning. Increasingly, we’re so polarized in this country, so it may be a Democratic issue. But I would love to have critical thinkers in our legislatures, nuanced thinkers, honest brokers; people running on issues of actual consequence, like vaccines, or in Texas, a woman’s right to have a choice over abortion. Or immigration, and so forth. Let’s have disagreements over real things, and not a bunch of pumped-up cultural anxieties. That’s what I would hope for.

Q. In New Jersey, Republican Jack Ciattarelli didn’t make critical race theory a central campaign issue, but did seem to allude to it: “I don’t think we should be teaching our students that white people perpetuate systemic racism,” he said. What’s your reaction?

A. It’s a politically savvy statement because it stokes the flames. We shouldn’t be teaching people that x or y person today is guilty for these things because of who they are. We should be teaching people the actual history. And the actual history is going to be very challenging. That’s not an invention of the political left, that’s how the past is treated by the present. The past rarely looks good. 

And there is structural racism in this country. To say there isn’t is utterly naïve.

Q. What are American kids missing today when it comes to our racial history?

A. They’re missing history. The people who criticize critical race theory for doing violence to the past need to look at what boards of education are doing right now. They are trying to change the literal terms about the way society was organized in the past, to serve a current agenda. Like Mississippi’s efforts to outlaw using the word “slave.”

Instead, it was supposed to be “laborer.” This was like, two years ago. That is insanity.

For decades, state boards of education or legislatures have banned the teaching of certain elements of the country’s past because it made their state or region look bad. If that’s your starting point, you’re going to retard the development of the people you’re educating. You’re not educating them, you’re indoctrinating them.

While history is constantly being reinterpreted, the fact is, these things happened. Slavery was real. And to suggest otherwise is to do a violence to the present, about how we understand ourselves.

Maine Writer post script- Critical Race Theory is racist fuel to white supremacists.  They finally found three words they know how to read. Unfortunately, the literal translation for this label is "racism" wrapped in a difficult to comprehend euphemism.