Why the Fight over Critical Race Theory Matters

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Thursday, June 24, 2021

 

Moms are rising up in counterrevolutionary revolt. I’ll say it again, moms are rising up in counterrevolutionary revolt against critical race theory, “anti-racism,” the introduction of the 1619 Project into high-school curricula, and the suddenly invasive demands of diversity, equity, and inclusion consultants who are being hired by their school districts. Although progressives wish, in vain, that this movement were an Astroturf operation run by shadowy right-wing donor networks, it has been springing up in school districts in reaction to initiatives led by administrators themselves.

 

Tatiana Ibrahim stood up in front of the Carmel school board in Putnam County, N.Y, and denounced what she termed the “communist values” that teachers and administrators in the district are promoting. “Stop indoctrinating our children. Stop teaching our children to hate the police. Stop teaching our children that if they don’t agree with the LGBT community, they’re homophobic,” Ibrahim demanded. “You have no idea of each child’s life,” she said, before announcing, in an only-in-America moment, that she is a Christian and her daughter is a Muslim.

 

She’s far from alone. “Telling my child or any child that they are in a permanent oppressed status in America because they are black is racist — and saying that white people are automatically above me, my children, or any child is racist as well,” said Quisha King, a mother in Duval County, Fla. “This is not something that we can stand for in our country.” Other revolts — as in Southlake, Texas, and Loudoun County, Va. — have been even more dramatic.

 

As with the Tea Party movement a decade before it, Fox News, Republican-run legislatures, and the institutions of conservatism are only just catching up to a political movement that has already gone viral. And again, as with the Tea Party, one of the reasons conservative institutions are only just catching up is that this movement — a defense of public schools as they were until recently — is not entirely conservative. But we’ll get to that.

 

Progressives, seeing the backlash, are feigning ignorance. They snort that critical race theory is a technical discourse that developed in law schools, and that it obviously isn’t taught in public schools. But Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado, in their 1995 book trying to define that rising movement of legal scholarship, do give a definition that seems suitable for describing the ideas now filtering down to other schools under a variety of names. “Unlike traditional civil-rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress,” they write, “critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

 

The contrast with the civil-rights movement is apt. That movement’s achievements have been accepted and understood by most Americans, including conservatives, as an attempt to expand on the ideals of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, which they see as a promissory note that was too long withheld from all Americans. What critical pedagogy, critical race theory, and the modern anti-racist movement have in common is an attitude of basic antipathy toward the Constitution, skepticism about American ideals, and a sense of zealous urgency in uncovering and overthrowing the operation of white supremacy that they believe to be the real motive for defending these ideals.

 

The revolutionary political ambitions of this approach are obvious. Education of the young is not just about filling them with facts, but ultimately about educating their hearts and forming their allegiances. Capitalism and private property come under fire in the most extreme forms of this theory, which is why conservatives identify it with communism. But more often, it is simply the features of our constitutional order that most annoy today’s leftists. The authors of the 1619 Project who hold that the American Revolution was primarily a defense of slavery are giving students a moral mandate to overthrow the products of that revolution: our Constitution and the anti-majoritarian features of it, including the Senate and the Electoral College. Critical race theorists hold even the Bill of Rights in suspicion — they see the first two amendments as false freedoms that allow only for the proliferation of private tyrannies. The presence of revolutionary politics naturally summons conservatives into this fight to defend the inherited American order.

 

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But there is something else at work that is drawing liberals and populists into the fight: Progressives have abandoned the dream of Martin Luther King Jr. and instead are dedicated to thoroughly re-racializing America’s civic space. The mainstream of life in the United States is recoded from its national name, “American,” to a racial one, “white.” This destabilizes the entire idea of a mainstream or a common civic inheritance. A refusal to recognize oneself as an oppressor is reframed as “white fragility.” A simple allegiance to equality under the law, traditionally understood, is ridiculed as color blindness, a stubborn unwillingness to recognize how racial identity structures power. And perhaps strangest of all, an odor of religiosity permeates the proceedings. Microaggressions are repented of and confessed. Identity experiences are received as testimonials. Privilege is recognized, like original sin, as an inherited guilt.

 

Critical race theory is not just an attack on the American inheritance of political institutions, it is also an attack on the social function of public schools as described by the once-radical education theorist and pragmatist philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952), who was the primary influence on the development of America’s public schools. The critical-pedagogy movement would overturn Dewey’s vision in key respects, and the popular defense of the social function of public schools should be recognized as some popular allegiance to the Deweyite philosophy, however unconscious.

 

Conservatives have long criticized public schools and Dewey for secularism. Brent Bozell Jr., a Catholic, thundered that education — because it integrates man into his world, orders his affections, and shapes his character — properly “belongs to religion.” Many nations that have inherited religious differences therefore have schools segregated by religion. Dewey thought that the expansion of the Catholic Church’s influence in education was an intrusion of the “powerful reactionary world organization in the most vital realm of democratic life, with the resulting promulgation of principles inimical to democracy.”

 

Most distressing to conservatives (and perhaps some liberals) was Dewey’s view that the state ultimately and rationally supplanted the church. “Doubtless many of our ancestors would have been somewhat shocked to realize the full logic of their own attitude with respect to the subordination of churches to the state (falsely termed the separation of church and state),” he wrote. “But the state idea was inherently of such vitality and constructive force as to carry the practical result, with or without conscious perception of its philosophy.” Getting religion out of public education allowed the fuller development of a “state consciousness” and unity in the people. For Dewey, secular education was the only way to achieve a common good, because “a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority” and “must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education.” For many conservatives, this is the road to idolatry, socialism, or both at once.

 

But it is Dewey’s emphasis on civic unity and respectful democratic engagement that has taken root in the school system, driving popular allegiance to it. Dewey is sometimes falsely associated with nativist sympathies, but he believed in a form of mutual assimilation. He lamented that some immigrant children too quickly gave up the “conservative” and traditional culture of their parents. But, though he wrote that he “never did care for the melting pot metaphor,” he affirmed that “genuine assimilation to one another — not to Anglo-Saxondom — seems to be essential to an American.”

 

“Obviously a society, to which stratification into separate classes would be fatal, must see to it that intellectual opportunities are accessible to all on equable and easy terms,” he said. And it was this mutual assimilation and sharing across differences that would allow a genuine democratic people to emerge and exercise power together:

 

We find that our political problems involve race questions, questions of the assimilation of diverse types of language and custom; we find that most serious political questions grow out of underlying industrial and commercial changes and adjustments; we find that most of our pressing political problems cannot be solved by special measures of legislation or executive activity, but only by the promotion of common sympathies and a common understanding.

 

In a word, Dewey believed in education as the means for forging a nation out of diverse peoples. Schools were to be a “social center” for “mixing people up with each other; bringing them together under wholesome influences and under conditions which will promote their getting acquainted with the best side of each other.”

 

And so it came to pass. For decades, public schools have been the most solid institutional feature of the American social compact: Local taxes are collected, public schools are provided for, and children who are not enrolled in another private arrangement for education are required to go to them. Public schools provide a kind of civic touchpoint, something other than voting for elected office or for zoning regulations — a place where locals can convene to express pride in their youth sports teams or the arts. Because the institution is for everyone’s children, every parent has an opportunity to look across the diverse religious, ethnic, and racial lines of his community and still see “our kids.”

 

Children were often encouraged to share “the best side” of one another as ethnic, religious, and civic moments passed through the calendar: Saint Patrick’s Day, Columbus Day, Black History Month, and Jewish holidays. Often this was done superficially, but also peacefully. The primary goal of advocating “common sympathies and a common understanding” in public schools was neither to advance a socialist future nor to celebrate the existing American republic and its institutions. It was to share a sense of growing up, experiencing adolescence, or coming of age. This vision of shared experiences as a necessity of democratic life provided a huge moral impetus for the racial integration of schools. It’s also what has made the American form of secular public schooling easy to export.

 

And it is the ferocious attack on the melting-pot democracy — the peaceful “mixing together” — that seems to most incense the parents, traditional educators, and students who resist critical pedagogy. The very fact of public schools assumes common interests, but the teaching inside them increasingly encourages mutual enmities. Paul Rossi, a teacher at Grace Church School in Manhattan, pointed out in a fiery letter that his school, in thrall to critical pedagogy, “induces students via shame and sophistry to identify primarily with their race before their individual identities are fully formed” and that “students are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions.” By demeaning “objectivity,” “individualism,” “fear of open conflict,” and even “a right to comfort” as aspects of “white supremacy,” during all-white racially segregated meetings, the idea of common sympathies and understandings is ruled out from the start.

 

While not all public schools are yet as extreme as Grace Church High School, the explosion of public money available for consulting in diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and the atmosphere of moral panic about race relations, selects for extremism and charlatanism. The introduction of highly emotional charges of “responsibility” and collective racial guilt offend an ingrained, if underdeveloped, belief that matters of the soul are safely left by public schools in the hands of parents and pastors.

 

Conservatives will surely join in the fight, as it involves the honor of our nation’s patrimony. But conservatives also need to be aware that the loyalties and aspirations involved in this are not exclusively their own. Conservatives were too often shocked when the Tea Party showed a populist edge. We should be clearheaded that, in the fight over schools, we are standing beside allies who see public schools not just as an imperfect means for passing on knowledge of our civic life but as a necessary institution for building bonds with their neighbors and thereby becoming one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.