On September 10^th local teacher Sarah Ostergaard tackled the difficult issue of Critical Race Theory in our local paper–a hot button issue in our Columbia, SC suburb and the nation. She posed this question and answered it by explaining that critical race theory is not in our schools because technically and historically CRT is “a theoretical framework involving the history of US laws, systems, and organizations that focus on “the nuances of the rights protected by the 1st Amendment vs. the 14th Amendment, the history of voting rights, or the quantitative effects of public policies. It is not a k-12 curriculum.”

It is true that the academic discipline of “critical theory” began in law schools at the graduate level, similarly to how postmodernism originated in English departments in textual criticism. But both CRT and postmodernism have broken out of their departments of origin and deeply impacted universities and colleges of Education.

Although I have taught in a predominantly black college and been part of a prison ministry to mostly black inmates, I do not have academic expertise in racial issues. Nor have I taught about them. But I have read enough to question Ostergaard’s assertion that the only CRT in our kids’ schools is Culturally Responsive Teaching which, Ostergaard insists, “is not about racial or gender or any specific identity.”  Rather, it helps “every child… [to see] him/herself represented in examples, stories, and visuals…and [feel] included and valued.” If only.

What is CRT?

The historic “critical race theory” that has its roots in legal theory is defined and introduced in many academic resources like Delgado and Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, and “Critical Race Theory and Education: Mapping a Legacy of Activism and Scholarship” by Kafi D. Kumasi. They have everything to do with racial identity and injustice, and little to do with “culturally relevant teaching. (See more titles quoted below at the end of this article and more info about CRT in my articles here and here.)

 What do all these primary sources about CRT written by proponents of CRT have in common? The very ideas which have ignited controversy in schools and communities across the nation. And I quote from them in their proponents’ own words*…

• ”Critical race theory recognizes that racism is endemic to American life… [W]e ask how these traditional interests [like federalism, privacy, traditional values or established property interests] serve as vessels of racial subordination.”
• “Critical race theory measures progress by a yardstick that looks to fundamental social transformation. The interests of all people of color necessarily require not just adjustments within the established hierarchies, but a challenge to hierarchy itself.”
• “The centrality of experiential knowledge. CRT recognizes that the experiential knowledge of People of Color is legitimate, appropriate, and critical to understanding, analyzing and teaching about racial subordination…” (In other words, the voices that should make policy, write curriculum and teach our children must be voices that speak from the lived experience of racial oppression. Other experienced voices in ethics, sociology, or theology should defer to them.)
• ”Critical race theory expresses skepticism toward dominant legal claims of neutrality, objectivity, color blindness, and meritocracy…” (per CRT these ideas camouflage systemic racism and must be deconstructed to reveal their inherent racial bias)
• “Revisionist History is another tenet of CRT [which] suggests that American history be closely scrutinized and reinterpreted as opposed to being accepted at face value and truth.“ (As in the 1619 Project (based on flawed research) which reinterprets America’s founding through the lens of CRT and is taught in public schools.)
• ”Critical race theory is interdisciplinary and eclectic. It borrows from several traditions, including liberalism, law and society, feminism, Marxism, poststructuralism, critical legal theory, pragmatism, and nationalism…”

Critical Race Theory is not just about technical legal studies or constitutional amendments and public policy.

While I’ve no expertise in racial issues, I do have an MAT in the history of ideas, and this list of CRT tributary ideas is waving red flags at me, especially Marxism. CRT is criticized by many as a form of cultural Marxism that interprets the world through the lens of racial rather than class struggle.

As a former teacher and one who loves my teacher friends, I have no desire to add to their burden. But the fact is that, while many of the tenants of critical race theory help us understand and address how racism is still experienced in America, many ideas from these primary resources are extremely controversial and sow discord in our schools.

If you had to slow down to understand them as you read them above, you are not alone. They are very academic and use words like “whiteness” and “intersectionality” with definitions unique to the discipline of CRT. Because of the unfamiliarity and complexity of the ideas, CRT can be unintentionally or intentionally camouflaged to mislead concerned parents about what is going on in our schools.

Ms. Ostergaard challenges us to believe that the only CRT in our schools is actually “Culturally Relevant Teaching” and not the ideas set forth above by critical race theory’s proponents. Education Week, a news organization that has covered k-12 education since 1981, explains that CRT is “widely misunderstood and is often conflated with other concepts such as culturally relevant teaching, which incorporates students’ cultures and experiences into instruction.”

Ms Ostergaard also asks…

Is CRT/critical race theory in our schools?

The answer is yes. A survey by Education Week a year after George Floyd’s murder found 8 percent of K-12 teachers “taught or discussed CRT with students, while 20 percent of teachers in inner-city schools did.” (Another survey found over 4 percent of teachers actually are required to teach CRT, and eleven percent said teaching CRT should be compulsory.) Since this was a year and a half ago, those numbers are probably larger now.

According to RealClear Investigations, California has adopted an Ethnic Studies Curriculum Model based largely on CRT ideas that will be mandatory by 2025. School districts are spending millions on training their teachers to be sensitive to racial oppression. Some of these millions are being given to companies like Pacific Educational Group who bring trainers to local districts to train them in the foundational ideas of critical race theory.

I would agree with Ms Ostergaard that no formal CRT k-12 curriculum is being taught in our schools as it is in California. But there are many other ways that CRT is being taught in schools across the nation, including in South Carolina. Trainers like those from Pacific Educational Group can be brought into schools to teach our teachers about addressing racism using the ideas of CRT, some of which are helpful. But how do we know which ideas might be taught to our teachers?

South Carolina has joined a growing number of states who have restricted the teaching of CRT in k-12 or universities by passing a budget amendment that restricts funding for teaching CRT or related lesson plans. It is good for one year. But a law banning CRT in k-12 stalled in committee last spring.

Even so, in March, 2022, watchful parents at Rawlinson Road Middle School in Rock Hill observed that the book Stamped by Ibram X. Kendi and incorporating ideas from CRT was being used by a teacher to talk about racism. As a result, a new wave of anti-white racism was dividing their children’s school. Black students began calling white students “slave trader,” and “colonizer” and throwing crackers at their fellow students. We need to pay attention to this issue in the next legislative session and in our students’ classes.

We need to remain watchful

If CRT is not in America’s schools, what are we to make of the fact that the National Education Association approved resolutions to “oppose attempts to ban critical race theory”? To help them do that they also voted to jumpstart a study that “critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.”

We can most certainly glean some helpful ideas about culturally responsive teaching and racial understanding from CRT, but, since it’s based on such a mixed bag of ideas, we need to be watchful and ask the right questions. If educators in our district tell us that CRT is not being taught in our schools, we can respond,

“What do you mean by CRT?” Do you mean [any of the ideas mentioned above, or in the linked articles below?]

Do you mean that it is not being taught in a formal k-12 curriculum?

What about teacher training?

What about a teacher simply reading about these ideas in a book, like the teacher in Rawlinson Middle School or like a teacher reading the best-seller White Fragility and wanting to discuss those ideas with their students?

Sometimes our deepest misunderstandings are over unclear definitions of words and our assumptions about ideas that may not agree with the evidence.

However we address the issue of CRT in our schools, may we not be known as voices who simply argue, but voices who seek the truth with grace for the benefit of our students’ education. I would hope that if Ms Oster  gaard and I sat down for a cup of coffee, we could sort out together what CRT is and how it’s influencing our schools by discussing the evidence with generosity and grace. And may we always communicate how much we appreciate all the hard work our educators are putting in to teach our students.

More articles and books that attempt to define and present the basic tenants of Critical Race Theory:

Harper, Patton, and Wooden’s “Access and Equity for African American Students in Higher Education: A Critical Race Historical Analysis of Policy Efforts,” The Journal of Higher Education

Yosso’s “Whose Culture Has Capital?”

Matsuda, Lawrence, Delgado, and Crenshaw’s Words That Wound

* I have found Neal Shenvi’s deep research into CRT to be very helpful and have used some of his quotes from primary sources in this article. See Intro to Critical Theory – Neil Shenvi – Apologetics (shenviapologetics.com)