CRT was born out of critical legal studies (CLS)—a philosophy that challenged traditional legal writings which focused on doctrinal analysis and called for a form of law that addressed individuals and groups in social and cultural contexts. In examining legal doctrine CLS also revealed how laws were used as a tool to build, support, and legitimize America’s class structure. Drawing from CLS, CRT first came about in the mid-1970’s with the early work of Derrick Bell and Alan Freeman. Overall, CRT was the suggestion that institutions will be criticized as they are either racist or perpetuate racism. But at its core, it was a critique of traditional civil rights strategies stemming from Bell and Freeman’s frustration with the slow pace of racial reform in America. Troubled by this frustration, they argued that traditional forms of resistance such as legal action, protesting, and marching produced smaller and fewer gains than in previous times. 

CRT has since been interpreted in various, distinct, and divided ways, leading to, what I consider, extreme ideas of what CRT actually is in leftist and rightist groups.  At large, these interpretations either vilify it—resulting in various critiques of modern interpretations—or, present it as an inclusive framework to understand American society and the world. But over the last few months CRT has inundated news headlines in American media as discussions of CRT conjured a culture clash. Discussions on the topic have provoked racial divides, political smear campaigns, and legal action to prevent its teaching. Fox News for example mentioned CRT over 1,900 times over three months as tensions elevated. Lawmakers from eight states (Idaho, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Iowa, New Hampshire, Arizona, and South Carolina) implemented “anti-CRT” state legislation that bans CRT in any form from U.S classrooms, and 20 other states have announced plans to announce similar legislation. With the exception of Idaho, none of these state bills actually mention the words “critical race theory” directly; however, they mostly ban discussions, training, and/or any suggestion that the U.S is inherently racist. They have also banned discussions about conscious and unconscious bias, privilege, discrimination, and oppression. Why is this happening?

Opponents of CRT interpret it as an attack on America. They believe it’s anti-American. They believe it’s a divisive framework grounded in Marxist doctrine that depicts America as racist and labels all white people oppressors or white supremacists. And they have asserted that CRT calls for a radical transformation of society. Is this perspective wrong? Yes. It’s only true that CRT draws from Marxism in labelling individuals as either the oppressed or oppressor. Yet somehow opponents of CRT have latched on to misguided and extreme interpretations to manufacture a crisis.

It’s my understanding that CRT is about racism being entrenched in our institutions—i.e., the education system, labour market, healthcare system, and criminal justice system—through laws and procedures, which in turn create disparities between races. It further places an emphasis on the pervasiveness of systemic racism in societal institutions. The idea is that systemic racism—being embedded in laws and procedures of these institutions—creates differential outcomes by race. Kimberlé Crenshaw, a founding critical race theorist, suggests that, “It’s an approach to grappling with a history of white supremacy that rejects beliefs that what’s in the past is in the past, and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it.”

CRT also posits that race is a social construction. What this means is that race was constructed by humans. It means that yes, race exists, but not as a universal, objective reality to all humans in the same way. It means that race was shaped by geographical, cultural, and historical contexts and agendas to categorize people socially using biological traits. Over the years, this has proven to be a contentious argument (but one that I agree with) as some conflate the idea of social construction with assertions that race is not real. They confuse it because they believe ideologies of social construction ignore our ability to perceive clear and distinct differences between ethnicities based on skin colour, hair texture, and other physical attributes that have become common sense—social cues mutually agreed upon and understood by us, that provide a cultural resume on people. But this misinterpretation isn’t the case. On the contrary, race is very real. It shapes our understanding and allows us to quickly process information about other people based on shared, social, and geographical information. The distinction is this: although race is real, it’s socially constructed because employing biological characteristics as it’s primary method of categorization doesn’t make it a biological thing. It’s socially constructed because it has always been a fluid concept historically defined by white people of power (and legitimized by their legal structures) to classify and create distinctions of those who were not white.

For those skeptical about this idea, consider your ethnicity. Through a Western lens, if you look back in history you may find that your ethnicity was categorically racially different in the past. And geographically, you may find that race is understood rather differently than it is in a Western context. If we look to the past, the fundamentals of the taxonomy of race can be traced back to 1735 when Carl Linnaeus published “Systema Naturae”, a book that categorized all species, but particularly humans. The book divided the human species into four types or “varieties”: Europaeus albus (European white), Americanus rubescens (American reddish), Asiaticus fuscus (Asian tawny), Africanus niger (African Black). Although race isn’t mentioned in any edition of his book, it classified humans by geographical location and maintained a hierarchy that consistently left African Black people at the bottom, and given Black people negative attributes such as “lazy” and “neglectful.” This wasn’t the case for the other species mentioned. Later on, Johann Blumenbach also categorized humans and these categories were used as the basis for scientific racism which influenced legal structures, allowing for anti-miscegenation laws, segregation, and more. But still, racial categories remained fluid. They continued to change and develop through religion, science, and law. Irish, Jewish, and Polish peoples for example once challenged ideas of who was white; and the “one drop” rule that existed in many U.S states once defined anyone with at least 1/32 “Negro blood” to be Black. Is this the how we perceive things today?