In this Moment of Intensified Attacks on Critical Race Theory, We Need Political Education

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who signed a bill on Friday, Nov. 12 that bans the teaching of critical race theory in public K-12 schools in North Dakota. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In early November of 2021, North Dakota’s Republican Governor Doug Burgum signed a bill banning the teaching of critical race theory (CRT). This law defined CRT as any suggestion that racism is systemically embedded in American society. This definition is wholly inaccurate. Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, is often credited with coining the term “critical race theory.” Crenshaw recently defined CRT as “a way of seeing, attending to, accounting for, tracing and analyzing the ways that race is produced.” While critical race theory is mainly concerned with institutions and systems, the framework is much more intricate. It is an intellectual framework that uses history and social circumstances to examine how racism operates in American law and culture. And, perhaps most importantly, the framework aims at eliminating, not just mitigating the harmful effects of racism. Despite CRT’s positive aims, strong opposition to it persists. Why?

The law, which prohibits even mere discussion of racism in state-funded schools, is just the latest effort in the war against teaching CRT waged by ultraconservative lawmakers. Earlier this year, for example, Nikole Hannah-Jones, an investigative journalist whose hiring brought enormous opposition from conservative groups, was denied tenure at the University of North Carolina. It is important to note that the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project—the project for which she’s most known—examines the legacy of slavery in the United States. Attacks on what is erroneously termed critical race theory are ongoing and manifold. This case demonstrates that such attacks are not just about divisiveness based on race, but also about teaching the racist history of the United States.

This campaign against teaching critical race theory in schools is ludicrous, given that critical race theory is not taught in high schools. To further emphasize this point, it's not just in high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools that CRT is not taught. Discussions of critical race theory only begin to show up at one of the highest levels of higher education: law school. As the editorial introduction of a seminal CRT text, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, states, “As we conceive it, Critical Race Theory embraces a movement of left scholars, most of them scholars of color, situated in law schools, whose work challenges the ways in which race and racial power are constructed and represented in American legal culture and, more generally, in American society as a whole.” Laws forbidding educators from teaching “critical race theory” simply bar educators from teaching lessons mentioning  race/racism; they seek to obfuscate the truth about the history and state of racial oppression in the United States. Thus, opposition to what is purported to be critical race theory is not genuinely concerned with the education of secondary school students.

Conservative lawmakers and activists are attacking what is supposedly critical race theory as an effort to prevent a future in which white supremacy doesn't structure every part of social, political, and economic life as it does now. It is an effort on behalf of white supremacy. Those active in the prison abolitionist movement, which seeks to dismantle the prison-industrial complex, police, and surveillance systems, see education as central to the imagining of new forms of safety and security that can supplant the violence of the carceral state. Education is a key component of dismantling the racist structures that underlie every facet of American life, so it is essential to not only prevent those opposed to “critical race theory” from consolidating a victory within this realm, but also to produce and disseminate historical knowledge and rigorous analysis of the legacy of white supremacy in the United States that continues to this day. What is needed to do so is political education. 

According to Rachel Herzing, a co-director of the Center for Political Education, “Political education isn’t just education about politics. It’s education for the specific purpose of making our politics more powerful. It is front line work.” Crucially, political education rejects anti-intellectualism, including the type of anti-intellectualism that’s manifesting within the conservative battle against the teaching of CRT. An ideology so rife with misinformation and anti-intellectualism should not be able to so easily undermine education. This fact makes political education all the more essential. Study is not only a necessary component of generative political struggle, but a tool that can be weaponized to fight back against reactionary elements.  Thus, teaching what Howard Zinn calls “people’s history,” which emphasizes “the role of working people, women, people of color, and organized social movements in shaping history,” in classrooms across the United States would generate a more honest and meaningful approach to history. Additionally, this education would render attacks on critical race theory illegitimate in the first place by introducing students to an accurate and complex understanding of history that opponents of education that implicates white supremacy desire to suppress.

What is happening at this moment is a profound clash between forces of the past and forces of the future—forces of white supremacy and those that seek to combat such. Critical race theory has come to signify any conversation about racism or any effort to educate students about the true history of the United States. Providing comprehensive political education programs would be essential to combat this effort. These programs could look like formal curricula taught in classrooms with discussion questions and reading materials, or informal study groups that coalesce around the issue of racial injustice. Whatever formations political education programs might take, they will help develop a strong, clear knowledge of the interrelationship between U.S. History and racial oppression, which could then result in systemic change and fundamental shifts in power.

Political education can also serve as a way to prepare ourselves for political action. To ensure that activism is anchored in theory, we need to combine political education and political action for each to enhance our understanding of the other. In combating attacks against teaching an honest account of history, our pedagogy must be rooted in historical truths, even if they contradict dominant oppressive ideals like white supremacy, and should aim to prepare students for political action that enables them to use theory to better the material conditions of their communities. We should be fearless in the face of the powers that be, seeking to eliminate the racism and erosion of civil rights with which CRT is occupied.

Giselle Williams is a first-year student at Columbia College. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, and her interests include Black studies, grassroots organizing, state violence, racial capitalism, anti-colonial movements, the prison–industrial complex, and U.S. empire. Giselle plans to major in either African American and African Diaspora Studies or History.