Professor Khaled A. Beydoun on why the U.S. is trying to stifle critical race theory, the language of resistance.
I have been teaching critical race theory at American law schools for nearly a decade. During that time, and since its inception in the early 1990s, the intellectual movement garnered little to no attention in the popular or media spheres. I can recall countless times I was stared at with a blank face, or a confused stare, when I introduced myself as a “critical race theorist.”
That all changed last year. Right-wing American politicians fixated on critical race theory (CRT) as their new political boogeyman, indicting it as “subversive” and “anti-white,” and scapegoating it as the new villain threatening American values. Pundits and politicians, holding court on the most prominent news channels and holding the highest ranks of American government, claimed that “critical race theory is as racist as the KKK.” The hysteria rushing from the corners of right-wing halls of power devolved into a full-fledged political and legal onslaught on critical race theory, with elected officials moving to make it illegal to teach in American classrooms.
Nearly 30 of the 50 states in the United States have introduced legislation to ban critical race theory in public schools. The legal bills target primary and secondary schools (kindergarten through 12th grade), despite the glaring reality that critical race theory is taught only at select colleges and universities. Yes, critical race theory—as a standalone course—is not taught in public schools, and from every cognizable measure, has never been taught in public schools. As a law professor, I can attest that the course remains selectively taught at American law schools, let alone elementary, middle, or high schools across the country. However, the political movement against critical race theory aims to go far beyond banning a course or stigmatizing a discipline that is virtually nonexistent in public education, and fixates on demonizing anyone and everyone calling for racial justice within the broader realm of American society.
In short, the political movement seeks to make the phrase “critical race theory” tantamount to an indictment synonymous with hatred, shutting down anybody associated with it as “anti-white” and, ironically, racists themselves. Furthermore, it seeks to create a culture of policing teachers, students, advocates, and administrators committed to racial justice—or anything remotely associated with it—and labeling them as “woke” social justice warriors bent on exacting “reverse racism” against white people.
Where did this movement come from? And why now, in 2021?
A mainstreaming of racial consciousness blossomed after the transformative Black Lives Matter protests of the past decade. Demands for racial equality and structural reform, and a reckoning of America’s dark history, catapulted the language of critical race theory into social media, news headlines, and the thick of those protests. Terms like “intersectionality” and “microaggressions,” once confined to law school classrooms or dense treatises, emerged as slogans on protest banners and sound bites on Twitter timelines, ushering in a moment when critical race theory became the language of resistance. Virtually overnight, critical race theory and its leading figures were singled out as the conductors of a (fictive) movement to “dismantle America” and then remake it in the image of revenge, chaos, and socialism—stereotypes ascribed to the discipline that distort what it genuinely stands for. The same old fearmongering found a new subject in critical race theory.
Stripped down to its nude body, the movement to ban critical race theory is the latest effort to sustain white supremacy. Capitalizing on the populist fervor seeded by the Trump administration, its proponents are wielding it as an attempt to cast anybody and everybody committed to racial justice as a “reverse racist” and “hater of America.” Their aim is to feed the racism of those Americans who are clinging tightly to a past in which segregation and subordination of nonwhites was the norm, and to hold on even more tightly to the political and economic power attendant with whiteness. However, instead of reading foundational CRT texts, such as Cheryl Harris’s “Whiteness as Property”—which deftly makes that case using the very legal principles taught in every property law classroom in the United States and the United Kingdom—those aiming to ban CRT hardly engage with the ideas or even know who the leading thinkers within the movement are.
As a Muslim critical race theorist myself, whose work centers on structural racism as it pertains to Muslim populations, I see that the movement to ban critical race theory shares many of the same hallmarks of the recent movement to ban “sharia law”—or Islamic law. That movement, which commenced in 2010 and pumped out more than 300 legal bills, capitalized on an intentionally distorted caricature of Islamic law to push disaffected and disgruntled white Americans to the polls to vote for right-wing politicians. The goal? Deepen the influence of the populist faction of the Republican party, which swelled in power following the emergence of the Tea Party in 2010. The anti-sharia movement propagated the Islamophobic fervor that then presidential hopeful Donald Trump fed off and later capitalized on by issuing his infamous Muslim ban.
The very same elements that spearheaded that movement are pushing today’s bigoted mission to ban critical race theory, fueled by that same energy of xenophobia, racism, and white anxiety that elevated Islam as a societal boogeyman. Given that my work on Islamophobia—and my public voice against it and other forms of racial and religious bigotry—stands at the very center of these two movements, I am intimately familiar with their common figures and features. Neither the anti-sharia nor the anti-CRT movement is committed to understanding the genuine nature of Islam or critical race theory. In fact, the very opposite is true. The objective, and very intentional design, is to mutate both into unrecognizable versions of their true beings, mangled into forms that echo and affirm the hate of their targeted audiences. It is the new McCarthyism, and even more poignantly, the new racism, built upon the same old stereotypes of Black and Brown people, immigrants, and minority communities that critical race theorists—including myself—are invested in undoing.
So, at its very core, what is critical race theory? Beyond the slogans and symbols, the clever terms and clichéd phrases routinely (and often wrongly) ascribed to it, critical race theory was—and remains—an attempt to wield law as an instrument that produces racial equality versus inequality. It is an effort that seeks to show how law has been used to oppress and dispossess, exclude and eliminate, along racial and racist lines, and then reimagine how law can be used to mend those injustices.
Any good faith survey of American history must conclude with the admission that the United States—and every hall of economic, political, and legal power under its umbrella—was built upon the valorization of whiteness and the relegation of everybody and anybody nonwhite. Critical race theorists, across intellectual and even ideological lines, interrogate this history and note how races like whiteness and blackness were constructed to determine who held access to resources and rights, and who would be flattened into property and stripped of freedom. Critical race theory is committed to retelling the sterilized accounts of American and European history that pervade academic texts, from the perspective of marginalized eyes, and working toward a future where the law takes race into consideration to work toward a more egalitarian society.
Above all, critical race theory analyzes the past and present with an intellectual honesty that’s absent from prevailing discourses. The development of white supremacy required a historical revisionism that cast Native Americans as “barbaric” and “uncivilized,” and colonists as benevolent discoverers who dealt with the Indigenous populations with compassion and neutrality. These are the lies that the movement to ban critical race theory seeks to uphold. These are more than mere fictions etched into textbooks and memorialized by statues standing tall across the United States—they are the very building blocks of the white supremacy the right wing zealously seeks to protect.
Let me be candid: Critical race theory is not beyond critique, and members of its community are the first to not only welcome but also intellectually engage with those critiques. But the zeitgeist rising against CRT is not interested in an honest intellectual exchange or in genuinely understanding what pioneering critical race theorists like Derrick Bell or Kimberlé Crenshaw wrote during its inception, or what emergent voices such as Sahar Aziz or Priscilla Ocen have to say today. Rather, their objective is to slander them without even reading a single thing they have written, fundamentally because the truth they speak calls into question the white power the anti-CRT movement desperately aims to sustain.
Once the anti-CRT movement is entirely undressed, you will find that familiar face of racism standing right in front of you. They once wore white hoods to cover it up. Now they hide behind a carefully designed movement.
