Critical race theory’s founder wants Biden to fight

With help from Rishika Dugyala, Jesse Naranjo, Ella Creamer and Teresa Wiltz

What up, Recast family! Former Vice President Mike Pence testifies before a federal grand jury investigating Trump, the woman accuser at the center of the Emmitt Till lynching dies and Daily Show correspondent Roy Wood Jr. is set to host Saturday’s “nerd prom.” First, though, a conversation with one of the architects of the critical race theory legal framework.

Pioneering scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw welcomes honest debate about critical race theory, adding that doing so is “giving honor” to her work.

But that’s not what Crenshaw, a law professor at both Columbia and UCLA, sees happening with the sustained attacks from the political right on school curricula that explore race and structural inequity.

Instead, she said, opponents are wrongly using it as a weapon “for their own political purposes.”

Critical race theory is a decades-old legal framework that explores how systemic racism is embedded in virtually every aspect of American society from health care to financial institutions and of course education. It’s typically taught at the law school level — and rarely, if ever, in primary and secondary schools.

CRT, as it is often referred to, is among the most salient issues in today’s culture wars, gaining national attention after the national and worldwide protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.


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Critics say it is nothing but liberal orthodoxy run amok, with conservative politicians, pundits and parents railing against its teachings — arguing that it is a push to indoctrinate children. Others argue CRT is being used as a Trojan horse since the theory isn’t typically taught to minors.

On Wednesday, Crenshaw, the co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum, a New York-based social justice think tank, will partner with civil rights organizations and teachers unions to stage a nationwide protest to push back on what they call “coordinated and dangerous disinformation campaigns.”

The event, dubbed the “Freedom to Learn National Day of Action,” is intended to encourage local pop-up teachings and reading of banned books to raise awareness of the issue.


Their efforts gained momentum earlier this week when the College Board, which administers Advanced Placement and SAT courses, announced it was making changes to their AP course in African American studies — after Crenshaw and others argued the curriculum had been “watered down” to appease conservatives.

“We are committed to providing an unflinching encounter with the facts and evidence of African American history and culture,” the College Board said in a statement.

Meanwhile, last week Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is building a formidable national profile off his opposition to the course, signed a law banning K-12 teachers from teaching critical race theory.

We talk with Crenshaw about how she feels about her work being used as a wedge issue in American politics, what she hopes to achieve with the national day of action and why she says it is dangerous for Democrats — including President Joe Biden — to refuse to take up arms in the “war on wokeness.”

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

THE RECAST: I want to get your thoughts on President Biden launching his reelection campaign.

CRENSHAW: I’m not surprised with conventional wisdom that the best chance of beating Trump is the person who beat him in the past.

But what concerns me about it is that there has to be a level of activation and enthusiasm among the base. And the base isn’t being addressed to the extent that the current crises that face the base would suggest.

There is quite frankly, an all-out assault on the civil rights infrastructure. Affirmative action is probably going to go away [after the Supreme Court hands down a decision] within the next couple of months. There’s been a three-year assault on anti-racism, not to mention the assault on voting and many of the other investments that his most loyal base counts as one of the most important aspects of their lives.

So my hope is that those who have been sitting out the “war on wokeness,” — those who see what I consider to be the road to an authoritarian state that’s paved through the history of white supremacy, those who think this can be solved without speaking to those things — I hope they’re not in the position to make decisions about what this campaign is going to look like.

THE RECAST: I’ve talked to activists who say they aren’t terribly excited about his candidacy. They are excited about the prospects of other people who could potentially be surrogates for the president, but not Biden himself.

CRENSHAW: I just think it’s potentially a mistake to assume that fear … is going to be the same kind of driver that it was in the last campaign.

I think it’s a mistake to think that most people who care about democracy and racial justice are going to show up simply because Trump, DeSantis and company are on the ballot. People have to have a reason to want to stand in those long lines. Believe me, the Republicans have done everything possible to make the lack of enthusiasm costly.

THE RECAST: There’s a line of thinking that suggests Biden is trying to appeal to these moderate voters that were turned off by Trump. And that may be what is behind him not leaning too forcefully into some of the issues you named — out of fear of being tarred and feathered as the “woke” president. But what I’m hearing you say is this will have the opposite effect for some in the Democratic base.

CRENSHAW: We’ve already heard that the approach is not to claim the mantle of “wokeness.” The approach is to focus on jobs, the approach is to focus on pocketbook issues. So we don’t really have to speculate about that.

It seems as though there are two different conversations going on: There’s some people who are concerned about the deterioration of our democracy, concerned about the assaults on the Capitol, concerns about denialism and what happens when significant parts of the population believe that the electoral system is flawed and is not working.

And there’s another conversation about anti-racism. The problem is that these two things are actually connected, right? If you actually look at Jan. 6, for example, it’s not accidental that the Confederate flag was flying in the Capitol, for the first time ever.

The whole case that has been made about a stolen election is basically a case that is made largely about stereotypes, attacks on people of color — there is an underbelly of racial resentment around the idea that people of color are actually exercising power. And so everything that you’ve seen happened since that time has been an effort to suppress that exercise of power.

So, if the Republicans are able to connect the dots in a way that advances their interests, and the Democrats are not connecting the dots in a way that’s advancing their interest, we’ve got an asymmetrical situation.

It’s not even a cultural war. It’s like a drive-by and the other side isn’t fighting at all.

THE RECAST: So you are spearheading a movement to attempt to get folks into the fight, particularly pushing back against the banning of books and having your work essentially stripped from history curriculum being offered in Advanced Placement. Talk to me a little bit about this national day of action that is set to take place next week.

CRENSHAW: We are excited about the fact that, at last, there is a critical mass of people all over the country who are are prepared to draw the line against conservative efforts to erase Black history, against efforts to make anti-racism unnameable, against efforts to undermine the ability of the next generation to understand what the meaning of that history is for the here and now.

So partly because of the debacle over the College Board’s Advanced Placement African American studies course in which they basically excised all the elements that DeSantis and the “anti-woke” faction identified as illegitimate, it became clear for most people who were watching this, that this really is a threat to deep values that we have around public education.

It’s about civil society. It’s about nonprofit corporations like the College Board deciding that DeSantis and company have made so much noise, that it’s better just to give them what they want than to stand and fight for the values that they claim to embrace.

So the opportunity to gather these folks actually came in response to several leaders demanding that the College Board restore the course [and] people all over the country saying: “What can we do? How can we stand together?”

THE RECAST: How are you going to determine the success of the day of action?

CRENSHAW: To a certain extent, I would say we are already successful because we have [hundreds of] people sign a letter demanding that the College Board restore the course, demanding that the College Board find other ways to allow students who are behind what I call the “neo-Confederate curtain” to have access to a real African American studies course. So that is then enormously gratifying to see how much people care about this.

So this is an effort to begin to … activate not just activists, but parents, teachers, students, letting them know that there is a space for their opposition and their determination to recapture all of the energy from 2020.

THE RECAST: Do you take the attacks on your work personally?

CRENSHAW: There are days I wake up and don’t want to open up the computer to see what the latest distortion is, you know?

I guess this is the thing I’ll say about that: No scholar minds being seriously engaged about their ideas.

But when they … basically recode your ideas, basically gentrify you out of the ideas and take it and use it for their own political purposes, that is like being robbed.

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OK, fam! It is once again “prom” season in D.C. with the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and associated events this weekend. For those celebrating, be safe out there and let’s hope for some viral moments — or at least some memorable zingers. Now to some news and then the fun stuff.

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