2019: Education, The American Story, and Critical Race Theory

2000-2023: A "Color-Blind" Nation
Written By Stephanie Brizee

Big Idea

The New York Times Magazine published a special edition marking the 1619 arrival of enslaved Africans in America, sparking a new public debate about U.S. history and race relations. The discussions highlighted familiar reactions, defenses, and misunderstandings that have troubled the nation since 1619.

What’s important to know?

  1. The 1619 Project and an Anti-Racist Future: The 1619 Project aimed to highlight slavery's role in America's founding and the enduring systemic racism stemming from it.

  2. Misunderstanding Critical Race Theory: While summer 2020 protests highlighted ongoing racial inequality, some politicians blamed “critical race theory” for undermining democracy and sought to censor the type of history that could be taught in public school classrooms.

1: The 1619 Project and an Anti-Racist Future

In response to the protests and this critical self-evaluative moment many companies and institutions declared their solidarity with Black Lives Matter and a general antiracist movement.

The 1619 Project Wordmark.

Source: Wikipedia

“Schools began incorporating antiracist curricula, and companies pledged to fight anti-blackness in their organizations” (Clark, 2023, p. 2143). In the growing desire for an antiracist future and a genuine reckoning with a history of systemic racism, several projects seemed to move the conversation forward—yet, simultaneously, a severe backlash of racist and openly hostile rhetoric arose in response to movement toward a more just society. 

In 2019, The New York Times released a series of articles which was later expanded into a 2021 book called The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. The project “made a bold claim… that the moment in August 1619 when the first enslaved Africans arrived in the English colonies… could, in a sense, be considered the country’s origin” (Silverstein, 2021, November 9).

The project sought to bring new attention to the way in which the institution of slavery was present at the founding of the United States, but also in the long history of systemic practices and racism which resulted from the enslavement of persons.

This project was not aimed at rewriting history as some political opponents argued, but instead drawing attention to slavery’s presence and echoes within history. As the author’s indicate,

Enslavement is not marginal to the history of the United States; it is inextricable. So many of our traditions and institutions were shaped by slavery, and so many of our persistent racial inequalities stem from its enduring legacy (Silverstein, 2021, November 9).

This large-scale historical project sought to complicate the narrative of American history, particularly engaging with the country’s “history of exclusion and violence towards Indigenous people and the enslavement of African Americans” in an effort to wrestle with the incongruence between “its ideals and its practices” (Sawchuk, 2023, May 18). In many ways the project continued longstanding debates amongst historians that focused on the complex inconsistencies between those lofty ideals of the founders and their participation (and defense) of systems of enslavement and oppression. 

The questions which arose in The 1619 Project and in the global protests against racism and systemic injustice in 2020 were not new, but these efforts came into conflict with aims by many “to eliminate antiracism efforts…” and abolish “diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives” and other supposed “‘indoctrination’ efforts in colleges and universities” (Clark, 2023, pgs. 2143-2144).

2: Misunderstanding Critical Race Theory

The politicization of the discussion found new grounds when conservative documentarian Christopher R. Rufo publicly equated these principles with CRT (critical race theory), intending confusion through a dangerous distortion of Critical Race Theory.

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, leading scholar of critical race theory.

Image Source: Wikipedia

“He planned the co-option of the term to be an imprecise but helpful boogeyman buzzword for all antisubordination efforts… he claimed to discover the ‘perfect villain’ to mobilize the conservative base” (Clark, 2023, p. 2160).

These less than subtle efforts to cloud the political discourse and muddy conversations concerning racism and United States history misrepresented a longstanding academic approach to history known as “Critical Race Theory” (CRT). This approach “has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language” (Sawchuk, 2023, May 18). Despite the manner in which the approach has been villainized, Critical Race Theory is:

an academic framework that holds that racism is embedded in American society and its institutions (Mitchell, 2023, July 13). 

and

an intellectual movement that “challenges the ways in which race and racial power are constructed and represented in American legal culture, and more generally, in American society as a whole” (Clark, 2023, p. 2150, quoting Crenshaw, et al. 1995).

Book cover of Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement

Image Source: The New Press

These two definitions of CRT reveal something important about it as an inquiry method: it focuses upon systems rather than on personal animus “as the primary driver of racial discrimination”, even positing “that racism is constructed and adopted into every workings of our cultural, legal, social, and other institutions” (Clark, 2023, p. 2150). Yet, for all of its objective and systematic approach to history, conservative politicians and commentaries often claim that it is “indoctrination” that is unpatriotic and itself inherently racist because of its attention to race. They often add a personal animus to their arguments against CRT, claiming such things as the inquiry method exists to personally shame or guilt White Americans; this was certainly the case with Executive Order 13950 in 2020.

In September of 2020, “then President Trump issued an Executive Order (EO) denouncing any attempt to provide antiracist instruction or training to federal employees and contractors. The EO claimed to ‘promote unity in the Federal workforce, and to combat offense and anti-American race and sex stereotyping and scapegoating’” (Clark, 2023, p. 2144). It is hard not to view this as a specific political backlash to racial progress and the global protests advocating for social justice and antiracist policies. In fact, in the speech by President Trump announcing Executive Order 13950, he specifically called out both CRT and The 1619 Project as his rationale behind the order: 

Critical race theory, the 1619 Project and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together (Silverstein, 2021, November 9, quoting Trump).

Despite the claims that the Executive Order and other such policies seek a commitment to colorblindness or protecting “the civic bonds” as Trump describes, these anti-CRT movements ignore the social significance of race as “a technology of systemic privilege and disadvantage; it dismisses race consciousness as itself racist” (Clark, 2023, p. 2155). Importantly, this anti-CRT movement claims “colorblindness” but is in fact quite “color conscious” as it either subtly or even overtly “presume whiteness is under attack and thus in need of protection” (Clark, 2023, p. 2189). 

To this effect, between January 2021 and December 2022, there have been over “563 local, state, and federal measures” specifically aimed against CRT and other antiracist content—and that number would likely be higher if factoring some of the “anti-woke” measures which are sometimes grouped into this legislative overreach into the classroom (Clark, 2023, p. 2165). Further, despite the claim within these bills and measures come from an expression of “parents’ rights”, these movements are not in fact “grassroots”, but their funding reveals their origins in well-funded national entities who have long sought to counter racial redistribution of power. 

Unfortunately, these anti-CRT measures and “parents’ rights” measures turn education and history itself into a battleground, where the unique positions of concerned parents are used to solidify White supremacy while claiming that color-consciousness threatens “the innocence” of White children (Clark, 2023, p. 2202). Instead of allowing for a more nuanced understanding of history, which acknowledges slavery and the racist remnants of that institution that have influenced laws, culture, and American society since the country’s founding, these debates have often intentionally vilified inquiries and research into systemic racism, calling any such narratives unpatriotic. While the protests during the summer of 2020 brought global attention to issues of racial inequity and injustice, they also galvanized those seeking to subvert that movement forward.

Your Turn

How do the arguments over the 1619 project and critical race theory replay arguments held in the past when racial violence and inequities became more public?

Stephanie Brizee
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