The final chapter of The Critical Turn in Education covers the branch of Critical Social Justice that is the favorite whipping boy among conservatives and has become nearly synonymous with the idea of “woke”: Critical Race Theory (or CRT). Indeed, many who have never heard of Critical Social Justice are familiar with Critical Race Theory. The notoriety of CRT is partly due to the number of outspoken adherents who came to prominence in the wake of George Floyd’s death, and partly due to the issue of race holding a unique place in the American psyche. While it is certainly the most recognizable addition to Critical Pedagogy, it is, in many ways, the least original.
Summary: Critical Theories of Race
Gottesman starts by documenting precursors to Critical Race Theory going back to the Civil Rights Era. He argues that the ideas of CRT represent a convergence on the issue of race from at least two distinct fields of study, and that this distinction is seen today in the separate approaches to Critical Race Scholarship.
While Gottesman doesn’t explicitly state this, I see the application of CRT in education as the first attempt to synthesize all the elements of Critical Pedagogy around a single issue and remake education in that image. In this way, it serves as a template for what to expect as different issues of Critical Social Justice come to the forefront when Critical Pedagogues continue to implement their vision of education.
Precursors to Critical Race Theory
Following the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s, many students and faculty in the humanities developed what could be loosely called a “racial focus” to the scholarship in their colleges and universities. This shift resulted in entire new departments forming around various ethnic studies such as Black, Chicano/a, American Indian, etc. The consensus surrounding this movement seems to have been that aims of colorblind equality were not sufficient to understand and defeat the history of racial oppression in the United States.
In the 1970s and early 80s these various approaches in the colleges of education coalesced around the idea of “multicultural education scholarship”.1 This initial idea of multiculturalism gained a decent amount of traction, but it was also criticized as being too focused on individual prejudice and not enough on radical reformist politics. In Marxist terms, it wasn’t “critical” enough. At this point, the Critical Theorists brought their Neo-Marxian tools to the issue of race to develop a more critical approach to multicultural education along with the new fields of whiteness studies, British cultural Studies, and Critical Race Theory.
Gottesman admits that these four fields are closely related and many of those involved contributed to multiple branches, but it’s also true that each has a slightly different emphasis. Critical multicultural education is the most general, as it seems to emphasize how identity-based oppressions are always present in our modern system (which is dominated by white supremacy). Whiteness studies is charitably summed up as: a system of arguments that justifies perpetual white guilt. British cultural studies focuses on the legacy of the British Empire and the way it created endemic oppression in the various racial diasporas throughout the world. It can be argued that Critical Race Theory has come to subsume the other three areas of study, but CRT had an additional component originating from the field of law and legal scholarship.
Gottesman suggests that the legal branch of CRT starts with scholar Derrick Bell. As a professor at Harvard, Bell was well known for using a “racial lens to teach American Law.”2 This is a fair enough argument, as Bell’s presence, then departure from Harvard led to a more permanent formulation of his nearly exclusive emphasis on race in many law classes, both at Harvard, and within legal education more broadly. Gottesman chooses not to discuss the field of Critical Legal Studies, a Neo-Marxist take on American Law, as a precursor to the legal branch of Critical Race Theory. James Lindsay has argued that Critical Legal Studies was, in fact, the first target and successful expansion of the race-based critique that eventually became Critical Race Theory.3
Critical Race Tension
The fact that Critical Race Theory arose from two different branches of Marxian critique has caused it to be “pushed in multiple directions, and as result [become] fragmented.”4 On one hand, there are the Critical Race Theorists who arose from the ashes of Critical Legal Studies after it failed to withstand accusations of systemic racism. This, so called, “legal approach” to Critical Race Theory was championed by Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate. On the other hand, the heirs to critical multicultural education, most prominently Daniel Solorzano and Tara Yosso, have argued for what they call an “interdisciplinary approach” wherein the focus is on remaking other fields in the image of Critical Race Theory.
The two camps of Critical Race Theory are ostensibly defined by the different themes they emphasize, though we’ll see that the “tension” between the two is more feature than bug when it comes to application. In taking a closer look at each branch, it’s clear that they are more similar than they are different. Still, it’s helpful to make a comparison to see aspects that permeate both approaches to Critical Race Theory and what is unique to the legal and interdisciplinary scholarship. In my view each branch has only one position that makes it truly unique from the other.
Interdisciplinary Perspective
The unique tenet that Solorzano’s interdisciplinary approach offers is, perhaps unsurprisingly, an “interdisciplinary perspective.” In a flagrantly circular manner, Gottesman defines this as, “…[the idea] that race must be understood in historical context and by using ‘interdisciplinary methods.’”
Perhaps someday I will dig into Solorzano’s work to try to tease out the meaning behind this opaque statement, but at first glance, it looks like he is attempting to take a shot at the legal approach by implying they do not have the interdisciplinary character needed to truly understand and utilize Critical Race Theory. James Lindsay has argued that an emphasis on “interdisciplinary studies” in the Critical Social Justice movement is often used as a sort of gnostic stamp of approval signaling an appreciation of higher truths that are only accessible when considering multiple “disciplines.”5
The Fraud of the Civil Rights Movement
The unique contribution of the legal approach to CRT is a specific critique of Civil Rights Law. In the words of Ladson-Billings, “Whites have been the primary beneficiaries of Civil Rights Legislation.”6 Unfortunately Gottesman does not elaborate other than to say that, like the critique of liberalism, it was a “structural claim.” This is another argument that may be worth hunting down in more detail, but, in broad strokes, it amounts to something like the following: “By advocating for, and ultimately passing, Civil Rights Legislation in America, whites were able to take moral credit for eradicating institutional racism while failing to address the systemic and structural racism inherent in a liberal, capitalist system. Thus, whites benefited because they never changed the ideology that ensures their continued hegemony but get to act as if they did.” Of course, this doesn’t stop with Civil Rights Legislation, but also provides a formula for criticizing any idea or action that addresses racial issues if it does not also call for the end of liberal capitalism (more on this below).
Racism as the Ideology that Perpetuates Oppression
Both schools contain some variant of the idea that racism is the omnipresent form of oppression in our society. The interdisciplinary view formulates it as: “race and racism are endemic,” while the legal approach argues that “racism is normal, not aberrant in American society.”7 While phrased slightly differently, it basically amounts to the same thing: in America, racism is a hegemonic ideology that can be found in all places and all times. This pillar is present in both approaches because it justifies the use of race and racism in for any purpose, and validates careers spent on the study of Critical Race Theory. Even Gottesman finds little distinction between claiming that racism is “normal”, and racism is “endemic.”
Adherence to Standpoint Epistemology
The legal and interdisciplinary approaches also make explicit adherence to some form of standpoint epistemology a tenet of their scholarship. Solorzano calls it a commitment to the “centrality of experiential knowledge.”8 Ladson-Billings argued that, “CRT departs from mainstream legal scholarship by sometimes employing storytelling.”9 The idea is to have a “theoretical” justification for weak arguments unsupported by facts. As we saw in Chapter 5, this approach originated with the Poststructuralist Feminists, but Critical Race Theorists were happy to repurpose it. It turns out that Critical Race Theorists have gotten significantly more mileage out appeals to lived experience than the poststructuralists ever did.
Commitment to Leftism
Once again, both approaches have something that can be boiled down to a moral commitment to far leftist politics, though they do emphasize different aspects. The interdisciplinary approach breaks this commitment into two pieces: “the challenge to dominant ideology” and “the commitment to social justice.”10 This is a (barely) recycled Freirean commitment to criticize the “oppressive” ideology and engage in praxis in the attempt to change it. The legal approach is much more specific with their target when they say, “CRT insists on critique of liberalism.”11 The nature and character of the oppressive society is usually left more nebulous, but the legal approach firmly vilifies Enlightenment liberalism and devotes a great deal of effort to Marxian critique of this system of government. In this sense, it should be clear that the leftism of CRT represents a break with, rather than an evolution of, either classical or modern Liberalism.
The Strategic “Tension”
In my analysis, these two approaches to CRT are not at odds with each other, so much as they represent different tactical moves to achieve the same strategic goal. It might by argued that Solorzano was anticipating the advent of intersectionality in which all critical theories would be joined together, but I think it’s more accurate to say that his work was laying the foundation for the popularization of Critical Race Theory through figures like Robin DiAngelo and Henry Rogers (aka Ibram X. Kendi). The tenets of the interdisciplinary approach are little more than arbitrary assertions that books like White Fragility and How to be an Antiracist repackage as if they were profound philosophical insights. And these books found fertile ground among a population who felt tremendous guilt but had failed to do very much deep thinking about the issue of race. In this sense, the purpose of the interdisciplinary approach is to pressure uninitiated citizens into demanding policy changes in line with Critical Race Theory. James Lindsay has called this, “squeezing the bottom.”12
The legal approach, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with attacking and bringing down the political system from the top. It masquerades as a rigorous legal theory (no theory that accepts storytelling as an alternative to fact-based scholarship is actually rigorous) in order to influence people who write and interpret laws. In particular, it endeavors to impart the perspective that the “solution” to racism is not to be found within political liberalism, but through tearing it down. The legal approach “squeezes the top.”
The strategy is that the masses, who have gobbled up ideas of Critical Race Theory from the interdisciplinary popularizers, will demand changes that legislators and judges, who have been trained under the legal approach to CRT, will be willing and able to enact. When pressure comes from both directions, it has more success in breaking through the cultural barriers.
Centering Race in Education
When considering how Critical Race Theory should be applied to the field of education it’s not surprising that the legal and interdisciplinary approaches are largely in agreement. The essential component is to bring the issue of race to the forefront whenever and wherever possible.
In establishing educational policies, “centering race” comes in the form of dressing up old Marxist theories of education with trappings of race. For example, the classical Marxist idea was that the disparate levels of wealth and property caused by the capitalist system were the cause of the disparities seen in levels of education. The Critical Race Theorists would merely make the addendum that disparate levels of property were, in fact, a result of racism inherent in the system. They argued that racism was the primary villain as opposed to capitalism. This pattern can be seen in the argument that “whiteness” is an ideology that white people hold in order to justify their privileged position in society (akin to Gramsci’s idea of hegemony).
Leftist Criticisms of CRT
The success of Critical Race Theory in gaining an outsized foothold both among the American Left and Western culture at large has led to some pushback from thinkers in other areas of Critical Social Justice. Classical and Neo-Marxists argue that racism is a product of capitalism and therefore racism should not be taken as the fundamental form of oppression. There was also the poststructuralist assertion that race is a social construct, which most CRT advocates agreed with. It took some exotic logical contortions to hold this view in tandem with the idea that race needed to be continually “centered.” Still others argued for the existence of other types of oppression that could not be conceptualized in terms of race (gender, sexuality, weight, disability, etc.).
It was this conception of “intersecting oppression” that had the most enduring impact on the way CRT and Critical Social Justice developed when Kimberlé Crenshaw articulated the goals of intersectionality. Rather than continue to see things in terms of a racial binary of black/white, Crenshaw argued that there was a multiplicity of oppressions that could be experienced and that the oppressed on each of these axes were engaged in the same struggle against the hegemony.
Intersectionality represents something of a truce between the various factions of Critical Social Justice: an agreement not to struggle for control of the movement while the oppressor is still in control of society. It’s through this alliance of the oppressed that a concept like the “cis-white-heteronormative-patriarchy” was conceived.
Prescriptions and Ideas for Education
Center Race
The practice of centering race can be considered the first, last, and all-important commandment of Critical Race Theory. Within the curriculum race should be the primary issue around which history or social studies is focused. Race and racial tensions should be the most prominent motif in classes like literature or vocabulary. The racial background of authors and scientists should be referred to repeatedly. Racial disparities should be analyzed in mathematics class. Differences in culture should be characterized as racial in nature. The curriculum should saturate the students with the issue of race so thoroughly that they see it in everything, because, as Critical Race Theorists argue, it is in everything.
Furthermore, race and racial discrimination should be considered the prominent issue in the evaluation and discipline of students. In practice, this usually means adjusting the standards of performance or behavior such that there is either no racial disparity or an advantage is given to those who come from “historically marginalized” racial groups. Racial background is to be viewed as the causally relevant issue for any problems or difficulties that a student may have.
The main effect on students is to ensure that each adopts some sort of racial identity. Racial differences between different students should be pointed out, emphasized, and labeled. While ensuring each student views race as highly relevant, it is inevitable that certain races will be viewed as good (non-white) and certain will be viewed as irredeemably bad (white). However, explicitly condemning white children for the color of their skin seems to be a bridge too far, even for Critical Race Theorists, so they use a workaround in which “whiteness” (as opposed to “white people”) is utterly vilified. Whiteness becomes virtually synonymous with unearned privilege and complicity in evil. Criticism of whiteness is always valid, and it becomes increasingly common amongst administrators, teachers, and even students.
Storytelling
Critical Race Theory scholarship involves, “putting a primacy on storytelling as a research methodology.”13 A related area called “counter-storytelling” is also considered prominent among the Critical Race Theorists. Though it is unclear from Gottesman’s book what the difference is, he indicates that,
“[C]ounter-stories can: ‘build community among those at the margins of society”; “challenge perceived wisdom of those at society’s center”; “they can open windows into the reality of those at the margins of society by showing”; and, “they can teach others that by combining elements from both the story and the current reality, once [sic] can construct another world.”14
Even after reading this paragraph more than a dozen times, I am still unclear about what a counter-story is, but my sense is that it is the construction of a sort of mythological narrative that runs counter to the current narrative (and likely the facts of reality), but resonates with the “spirit” of the oppressed. Then, when this mythology is in place, it becomes the new reality…somehow.
It's also worth noting that this use of “storytelling as research” is a further operationalization of standpoint epistemology to, not just evaluate knowledge claims, but define an entire system through which knowledge will be generated.
Jargon and Crossover Terms
Racism/Racist
Motte
Showing prejudice, positive or negative, towards a person or people based on ethnic background or physical characteristics.
Bailey
A characteristic of any individual who lives in a society with racially inequitable outcomes (prejudice) and either comes from a historically empowered group or benefited from the ideology established by a historically empowered group (power).
Strategy
The bailey definition clearly applies to just about anyone, it just doesn’t mean very much. The Critical Race Theorists want the flexibility of the bailey definition with the gravity of the motte definition. The idea is to be able to apply the sin of racism as thoroughly as Christian philosophy applies original sin. Once the guilt associated with being a racist has been accepted, the tenets of Critical Race Theory are presented as the only way to salvation (though such salvation is never achievable). The argument for why everyone in America (except the racially oppressed) is considered racist is not discussed in Gottesman’s book (it is assumed though), but it would look something like: “America could not have become what it is today without racist institutions, therefore, those with more wealth or privilege owe what they have to racism and are therefore, racists.”
It is particularly effective in America because of the real presence of white guilt. It is true that at one point in this country most people with white skin held the belief that lighter skin was sufficient reason to consider themselves superior. It’s a difficult thing to square with reverence for one’s country and its founders. With countless pieces of literature, film, and historical text documenting the horrors of the slavery that was practiced in America, it is virtually impossible not to feel sympathy for the plight of black slaves. Critical Race Theory seeks to turn that sympathy into guilt, then use it as a moral (and increasingly financial) blank check.
Seize the Motte and Bomb the Bailey
It is essential to reject the Bailey definition entirely. It must be identified as the vile, manipulative tactic that it is and called out as such. Furthermore, those of us who find ourselves opposing Critical Race Theory must become increasingly willing to assert that we are not racists when we are accused of it by someone operating under the bailey definition. In the civilized society that existed the day before yesterday, being accused of racism was considered a serious charge. Today, Critical Race Theorists attempt to smear it everywhere, to demoralize people by getting them to accept that their mere existence makes them racist. We must absolutely reject all such unearned guilt.
Whiteness
Motte
The (inconsequential) trait of having lighter skin.
Bailey
A privilege created and held by those who have lighter skin for the purpose of maintaining their superior position within society. People of different skin color can be excluded or selectively admitted to the use of this privilege. It can also be seen as an ideology in which the values of white cultures are taken as the “norm” or standard by which other cultures and peoples are judged.
Strategy
Like all forms of racism, this characterization of whiteness involves attaching a great many sins and defects (real or imagined) to skin color. To identify something as possessing whiteness is to simultaneously declare it to be oppressive, unthoughtful about its nature, and lacking in empathy, but to do so in a way that seems absurd to argue against. Because a white-skinned person who claims to be free of “whiteness” is refuted with a glance at their skin tone, one who does so appears foolish for trying (though it does require some mental gymnastics to declare that people like Larry Elder or Vivek Ramaswamy benefit from whiteness). Encapsulating whiteness as a form of access to privilege that certain people have and others don’t, or as an ideology that privileges some over others serves to not only connect it to the various strains of Marxism, but also plasters an intellectual veneer over the plain, naked racism that it is.
BOMB the Motte and Bomb the Bailey
There is no using the idea of “whiteness” in an honest way. When used in argument it serves only to attach vice to skin color and it needs to be identified as such wherever and whenever it is used. James Lindsay has called this “naming the dynamic.” The goal of the person using it is to engage in an argument in which a white person eventually makes the (apparently absurd) claim that they do not possess whiteness. This sort of dynamic should never be engaged, instead the dynamic should be explicitly identified and condemned for the despicable tactic that it is.
Legal vs. Interdisciplinary
Motte
The explicit instruction in the tenets and methods of Critical Race Theory. The motte is associated with the claim that, “CRT is a legal theory taught in law schools, not to K-12 students.”
Bailey
Engaging in the practice of Critical Race Theory in the classroom.
Strategy
Another benefit of having the “tension” between the legal and interdisciplinary approaches is this sleight of hand in which the existence of an explicit legal theory of CRT is used to dismiss the claim that CRT is in education. Typically, distinction is brought up in the context of a bait-and-switch statement like “CRT is not taught to children in K-12 schools.
Seize the Motte and Bomb the Bailey
In many cases it is true that CRT is not explicitly taught to students (though existence of various study guides for high schoolers on the topic gives lie to this claim as well), but whether CRT is taught is irrelevant. The point is that teachers, administrators, and other school personnel practice Critical Race Theory in the course of their duties as educators. This means engaging in the practice of “centering race” through curriculum choices, lesson planning, and “spontaneous” discussions about race in class. It's the practice of CRT within the classroom that we must object to, not only because it is a program of ideologically driven indoctrination, but because it crowds out actual learning.
Questions
How genuine is this “tension?”
In reading about the differences between the legal and interdisciplinary approaches, I was struck by how useful this separation is in terms of having a sort of popular version for consumption by the masses and an elite version to guide the new rulers, not to mention the misdirection possible with the claim “CRT is just a legal theory.”
That said, it does seem like there is genuine disagreement between people like Solorzano on one hand and Ladson-Billings on the other, so I don’t think this split was a deliberate strategic choice that someone made at the advent of Critical Race Theory. I would be curious to know to what extent these different approaches view each other as allies or rivals.
Will the Critical Race Theorists Give Way?
It might be argued that after its peak in 2020, Critical Race Theory’s heyday has passed, at least in education. Today, practices like Drag Queen Story Hour and Queer Pride assemblies are taking center stage, with sexuality and “gender expression” becoming the oppression du jour. While intersectionality does help weld them all together, will advocates of CRT demand a return to a more explicit focus on race? Or will they be content to share the stage?
Gottesman, Isaac H. The critical turn in education: from Marxist critique to poststructuralist feminism to critical theories of race. p. 117 New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016.
TCTiE p. 127
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-critical-race-theory/
TCTiE p.117
The discussion of this idea can be found in Lindsay’s “Strange Death of the University” series.
TCTiE p. 128
Ibid
Ibid
Ibid
Ibid
Ibid
It’s important to understand that this criticism is not primarily a criticism of the American Liberalism that has come to be associated with the Democratic Party and American Left, but of the liberalism that emerged out of the Enlightenment and serves as a primary political principles of the “liberal democracies” of the West.
I have not been able to find the exact podcast in which Lindsay references this, but it was in one of the analyses he did regarding the cultural revolution:
https://newdiscourses.com/2023/02/woke-mao-and-the-american-cultural-revolution/
https://newdiscourses.com/2022/07/paulo-freires-perpetual-cultural-revolution/
https://newdiscourses.com/2021/01/antonio-gramsci-cultural-marxism-wokeness-leninism/
Additionally, he wrote an essay that describes a good deal of the strategy involved as well:
https://newdiscourses.com/2021/04/rise-woke-cultural-revolution/
TCTiE p. 130
Ibid