Former President Donald Trump issued an executive order in September 2020 excluding from federal contracts any diversity and inclusion training interpreted as containing “Divisive Concepts” regarding race, sex, or stereotyping. One of the concepts considered “divisive” was critical race theory (CRT).
At that time, Trump also took aim at the 1619 Project as part of a White House event focused on the nation’s history. He called both CRT and the 1619 Project “a crusade against American history” and “ideological poison that … will destroy our country.”
It is doubtful that Trump actually knew what critical race theory was, simply because it is an obscure, loosely organized intellectual movement. CRT is not diversity and inclusion “training,” but a practice of questioning the role of race and racism in society.
The CRT concept was officially organized in 1989, at the first annual Workshop on Critical Race Theory, though its intellectual origins go back much farther, to the 1960s and ’70s.
Before 1989, CRT was centered around a movement known as critical legal studies, (CLS), which focused on examining how the law and legal institutions serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the poor and marginalized.
The story behind the story
The move toward CRT began in the 1970s as legal scholars, activists, and lawyers tried to understand why all the civil rights era victories had stalled. A few years later, in the early 1980s, students of color at Harvard University Law School organized protests over Harvard’s lack of racial diversity in its curriculum.
These students supported Professor Derrick Bell, who left Harvard Law in 1980 and then became the dean at the University of Oregon School of Law. While at Harvard, Bell had developed new courses that studied American law through a racial lens.
After Bell left, the students of color wanted Harvard to hire a faculty of color to teach the new courses in his absence. Harvard refused the students’ requests, saying that no sufficiently qualified black instructor existed.
In response, numerous students, including Kimberlé Crenshaw and Mari Matsuda, boycotted and organized to develop an “Alternative Course” using Bell’s Race, Racism, and American Law (1973, 1st edition) as a core text.
This move led to the first formal meeting centered on critical race theory – the 1989 “New Developments in Critical Race Theory” workshop, which has become an annual event.
As Crenshaw states, only she, Matsuda, Gotanda, Chuck Lawrence, and a handful of others knew “that there were no new developments in critical race theory because CRT hadn’t had any old ones—it didn’t exist, it was made up as a name.”
“Sometimes you gotta fake it until you make it,” Crenshaw said.
Crenshaw writes, “one might say that CRT was the offspring of a post-civil rights institutional activism that was generated and informed by an oppositionist orientation toward racial power.”
CRT is a concept that needs to be discussed
To make a long story short, understanding how legal frameworks come about and the relationship between laws and people of color is, in its broadest sense, important in today’s society.
The offshoots of CRT are many and varied, and include a number of movements focusing on womens rights, police brutality, hate crimes, healthcare, poverty and welfare and voting rights. Many of these issues are being used by Republican lawmakers and state legislatures as political tools.
Suppressing voting rights, equitable healthcare, and anything else that leads to inequality is inherently wrong, regardless of what color or nationality a person claims. This is what Republican lawmakers are afraid of, even though they really don’t understand the concept themselves.
