Critical Race Theory is a trigger for many folks. We explore what CRT says and does not say about race in America and how folks on different sides of the issue might find common ground.
Transcript: An Introduction to Critical Race Theory
Will: It's not just the laws themselves, but the conscious and unconscious biases that shape how the laws are put into practice.
Penny: Welcome to the Diversity & Inclusion for All project supported by Calvin University and the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship. Together, we'll listen to key perspectives, build our knowledge, inform our thinking, and get a little better equipped to engage our world.
One of the hot topics especially in the last couple of years is critical race theory. And some people think it's kind of a bunch of hooey. And other people think it's really important to understand or to embrace even critical race theory in order to figure out and analyze and understand what's happening in America today. I wonder if you can tell me just in just a few sentences, what does critical race theory refer to? Like what is it? And then we can try to unpack it a little bit and get some helpful ways to think about it and understand it, to have better conversations about how to navigate life together. First of all, what is critical race theory?
Eric: A legal theory that that argues that racist policy is is baked into or built in to the legal system. And that it's it's been there historically and is there presently. And this is one of the reasons why racism persists in this country.
Penny: So just really concretely, an example of a law that was racist is you may own slaves. A black man is worth three quarters of a person. These things that existed, like there are laws on our books from the past that existed, and that would be evidence, if you will, for some of the tenants of critical race theory.
Will: Yeah, and more examples. So the original naturalization acts 1780s and 90s meant that only white immigrants could become citizens. Non-white people who came to the United States couldn't become citizens. If their children were born here, their children would be born citizens. But the immigrants themselves, if they weren't white. So, Asian immigrants, Chinese immigrants in the eighteen forties, they could not become naturalized citizens. Their children could, however. Those policies did not change until the 1960s. I think it was, right.
Penny: So for decades there was this phrase in in the legal system. Right. That Asian people, especially from China, but other parts of Asia who emigrated were “ineligible to citizenship” like they couldn't even if they were the best, quote, unquote, American ever. They were ineligible to become citizens.
Will: Yeah. And, yeah, it would have been true for Africans and others as well. So whiteness came with privilege. Other laws would be ethnic and racial quotas in immigration, so that people from some countries say the Netherlands or England, they were preferred immigrants. And so more were allowed to come, whereas immigrants from Italy or Lebanon or Poland were less preferred. And so there- were smaller quotas for them. And that entire racial groups by the early nineteen hundreds were excluded. Chinese, Japanese, you know, people from other parts of Asia were excluded by the 1920s from coming at all these immigrants. And again, those policies don't end until the 1950s and 60s.
Penny: Laws that disadvantage certain racial groups and gave advantages to others that those existed and have consequences for today --that's part of critical race theory. What would be other important things to know or understand about what critical race theory is trying to say?
Will: Even laws that were on the books looking race-neutral were not written or intended to be enacted in racially neutral ways. So, literacy laws for being able to register to vote and vote. Literacy laws or requirements, I should say, the literacy requirements for immigrants. Those were explicitly written to look race-neutral so they could stand a constitutional test, but they were intended to be enacted in ways that were not race neutral. There also were eugenics laws on usually at the state level, I think maybe entirely at the state level, that allowed governments to sterilize women who were considered immoral or diseased. And when you look at how those were enacted, depending on your ethnic or racial group, you were either more or less likely as a woman to undergo this involuntary sterilization. These laws were written to look race-neutral. They were meant to be enacted in ways that served racial goals.
Eric: And this is why it’s important to understand unconscious racial bias or even conscious racial bias that plays that plays into the enactment and application of these so called race race-neutral laws.
Will: And this is why it's important to think about this systemically. It's the system, the legal system, not just the individual laws. So how would, you know, how attorneys are educated, who are educated, who gets opportunities, how all the processes in the legal system, whether it's criminal law or civil law, how that gets put into practice? It's not just the laws themselves, but as Eric is suggesting, the conscious and unconscious biases that shape how the laws are put into practice.
Penny: When people react negatively or want to say that critical race theory is not a valid philosophy or way of thinking about why things are the way they are, what are the key arguments or perspectives that are important to understand about that point of view?
Eric: Oh, that that point of view. People say that critical race theory teaches that all white persons are racists and are privileged, and that black people or persons of color in general are just inherently victims and oppressed. And that's that's where they remain …it’s static.
Will: Maybe that white people and white children, if you're thinking about educational contexts, are meant by critical race theory to feel guilty and to feel shame and and and all of that, that kind of thing. So in ways that, as Eric said, are very static. You know, good guys and bad guys.
Eric: You know, as scholars, you know, we especially …stories, we tend to never … teach in ways in which social positions, economic conditions, whatever are just static. I mean, we historians, we we we we look at change over time. So and we want to define terms.
Penny: Is this true or not true? If I'm a white person, critical race theory really should make me feel guilty. Is that true or not true? Like, is it saying I'm guilty of everything that's wrong with our society today?
Will: I think the short answer is “no.”
Eric: Yeah, right. No.
Will: I mean, the simple point would be that critical race theory is less interested in whether you or any other particular white person has racist ideas, although that's certainly worth talking about. But that's not really the point of critical race theory is whether a person has racist ideas or whether a person as an individual is prejudiced. I mean, that's an important part of thinking about racism. But critical race theory is about how even where individuals aren't consciously racist and don't consciously hold racist ideas or do racist things, nonetheless as people who are part of the larger society and the various social systems that make our society operate, participate in practices that produce racial inequalities. And it isn't only white people who are doing these practices, it's people in general. This is about how systems of relations between people work.
I think that part of white responses, very negative, harshly reactive responses to critical race theory…There's I think there's two or three things going on. One is people's response is to feel guilty. And they don't like it. And they think that's the point, that it's about them, that they're supposed to be made to feel guilty when the whole point is not about them. The point is about a system and how the system creates inequities. And then the question is, how do we participate in the system? So, first of all, in their response that they feel like the goal is to make them feel guilty. Well, it's not about you. The fact that you think it's about you, maybe that's something that's what you should think about. Why do you think it's about you? And so that's part of it.
I think a second part of it is conservative suspicion of the idea of social systems. You know, that systemic things happen. It's a philosophy that says it's about individual actions and that talking about social structures and social systems is going beyond evidence and making up some sort of model or idea to explain things and that, that it's a bad model. And most of those conservatives will talk about the market. You know, and, you know, that's that's the one system they'll accept that the market is bigger than any of our individual economic choices. The market, you know, shapes our economic choices and has impacts on us. But they're more suspicious of social system thinking when it comes to social relations, political relations, cultural relations. So that's maybe a philosophical or ideological skepticism about systems of structural thinking.
And then a third thing is where critical race theory or thinking that is similar to it in disciplines other than the law. So, when history and sociology and political science and so on, they identify that kind of thinking to describe and analyze American society and history as inevitably tied to a specific set of policies. If you use this way of thinking about American history or society, therefore you must support these specific policies. And so I think the whole critical race theory conversation gets wrapped up in contemporary politics about what we should do and what our policy should be. When I think that you really need to be separate, accepting critical race theory or similar kinds of ways of thinking about systems and structures doesn't necessarily lead to: therefore, you must agree with this policy choice. It might lead to and I think does lead to thinking about what are political solutions for these enduring problems. But it tends to get caught up with current politics, which is not never a good thing in education, at least.
Penny: So it strikes me that critical race theory, the thing that we could possibly agree on, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, and is that there are some problems and inequities right now in our system. Point one. Point two. There have been a series of laws and practices in our country that have disadvantaged certain groups of people and given advantages to other groups of people, and that we have to find a way forward. It seems like we could possibly agree on that. Now, I think that you're right, there's right now we have to decide what's the best way forward. And that's where you're going to get those divides again, right. That certain people think big government is a helpful thing and other people think big government is the worst thing ever. And you have to, you know, hands off is the best way, because then we'll get where we need to be. But I think you're right, it gets conflated. And people who want certain policies to be the way forward tend to say, well, therefore, we want to negate we want to bash critical race theory when I think that we can actually agree about some things about critical race theory to begin with and go and work from there.
Will: I think that's right.
Penny: If you're interested in learning a little more about critical race theory, listen to Episode 29: Critical race theory, part two, where we also discuss the 1619 project.
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