Today’s White Grievances Indicate that Racism is Still Alive in America

For many of us who are paying attention to the dynamics of race, the public outcry now being voiced by many whites about the teaching of critical race theory in schools, about the institutional unfairness of affirmation action policies, and concerns about white replacement in America all sound like the latest versions of white racism. As a Brookings Institute article in August of 2021 noted, conservative news outlets have focused a lot of their commentary this year on the topic of Critical Race Theory (CRT). They claim that those who are teaching this theory are accusing all white people of being racist oppressors while portraying all Black people as hopelessly oppressed victims of racism. However, CRT is not a curriculum nor is it a model for teaching about race relations in America. As the sociologist, Joe Feagin, points out, “CRT originated in and is still mainly taught in law schools” and not in local elementary or high schools. The term was developed by two law professors in the 1980s to describe a perspective to explain why civil rights court decisions and racial justice laws in the 1960s-70s had not brought about the kind of racial desegregation and equality that was hoped for. Instead of emphasizing individual racist acts, CRT became a lens for the legal community to focus on how institutional structures and social systems perpetuate racist public policies. In the hands of conservative media like Fox News, however, CRT has become a culture war issue that needs local government or school board action. So, this term has essentially been hijacked by social and political ideologues to object to educational efforts to teach the racial history of the U.S. in public schools and to address the impact of slavery, Jim Crow laws, racial segregation, and notions about white supremacy on people of color in our nation. I am among those who see this controversy over CRT as the desire of conservative whites to protect the dominant white narrative about America’s virtues from the scrutiny of honest history and to maintain, indirectly, the sense of white privilege as America becomes more racially diverse.   While there are numerous articles and books that explain the origins and uses of Critical Race Theory in legal education, most of the white people who have gone berzerk about this perspective on institutional racism really don’t know squat about the concept.  They might actually learn something by listening to the comedian, John Oliver, unpack this contentious issue (start the video from the beginning rather than where it starts in the middle) –