Being Critical of Critical Race Theory

If you had asked me a year or two ago about “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) or the massacre at Black Wall Street, I might have thought you meant strategies for winning the Indy 500 and a really bad day on the stock market. (It was a Friday, right?) Of course my ignorance of the latter is indicative of the former.

In the wake of the centennial of that very bad day, actually two days, in Tulsa that erased generations of modest wealth and took hundreds of innocent lives, it would behoove all of us newly educated about such horror in our past to pay closer attention. The destruction of Black Wall Street was certainly one of the most evil events in American history since the Civil War and, therefore, we need to use this occasion to learn a little more about CRT and why it matters for all of us, not just people of color.

If you are paying attention to the news but have not been paying attention to CRT, then what you probably know most is that this particular way of looking at our history and our institutions is being heavily criticized as promoting hate of America and trying to make white people feel guilty for being white. That is complete and total nonsense, IMHO. CRT simply provides a lens through which to look at our society in light of institutional racism and it makes the case that that racism is not simply a few bad apples or even bushels of bad apples that have done bad things to people of color, rather it is baked into the whole system. Rather than “Baked Alaska,” we are talking a whole “Baked America,” though not a dessert any person with an ounce of integrity would want to eat. CRT reveals the stain of racism that is wide and deep on our history and our present. Understandably, many find such a view of our country upsetting, and rightly so. It is upsetting. But that’s not the question we should be debating. The question is, is it accurate? Does it help explain our history and what we see happening today? Consider some of the things that CRT says about our country:

1. Slavery was bad (You think?) and in many ways, made us who we are today. Think about all the wealth generated by that labor and how much of that wealth today belongs to descendants of slave holders and how much to descendants of slaves. If you think it has somehow all been magically dispersed equally among the people, think again. Think of the families promised 40 acres and a mule after emancipation who got neither. Think of the generations limited by their skin color on what jobs they could do, where they could live and what schools they could attend. Think of how much, or how little, wealth was passed from one generation to the next. Think of the social, business and political connections, or lack thereof, into which every child is born. The impact of America’s “original sin” is an ugly scar that runs throughout our country. But it is not about making others feel guilty about that scar, it is about being honest about how it got there.

2. We took much of our land from the Native Peoples who lived here for centuries before the first Europeans arrived. Just as with slavery, to do so required a rationale that one group was superior and the other inferior, even less than human. (Recall that Native Americans were deemed “savages” and slaves were counted as 3/5ths of a person.) The Doctrine of Discovery (the first to “discover” a land was entitled to claim it for their nation) led to the devastation of entire civilizations on this continent.

3. Jim Crow was the law of the land for a century after slavery ended. This meant everything from denial of a seat on a bus to the right to vote in an election. In reality, Jim Crow was simply slavery in a new form. It was our own racial caste system that took decades to dismantle, and many would argue, still has a long way to go.

4. Lynching became the means to enforce Jim Crow. The Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery has documented over 4000 lynchings in 800 different counties that occurred from the end of the Civil War to the Civil Rights era. The Tulsa massacre was initiated when armed Black citizens of the area prevented a lynching of a Black teenager who touched a white girl on an elevator. (She claimed assault, he said he touched her arm.) For that “offense,” recanted by the teenage girl before the shooting started, up to 300 people were killed. Not one person was ever prosecuted for the mass killing. Few perpetrators of lynchings ever were. For most of our history in much of our country, being white meant you had certain privileges over non-white bodies. Black Lives Matter is telling us that is still true to this day.

5. The education system was heavily weighted against people of color. Next to Roe v. Wade, Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education is probably the most famous case decided by the Supreme Court. Up to that point, “separate but equal” was the law of the land in most states. Only separate was the only thing achieved and equal wasn’t even in the neighborhood. Even after Brown, it would take another decade or longer for desegregation of public schools to take hold. Were it not for the enforcement by federal troops, who knows how long it would have taken in certain southern states.

6. Housing was no less discriminatory, and with redlining common, maybe even more so. Zoning laws to limit neighborhoods to single family homes were largely created to keep people of color out. And of course property deeds often included covenants that limited ownership to those of the “Caucasian race”. Oregon, birthed just prior to the Civil War, tried to stay out of the fray by choosing to be a free state and then we redlined the entire state, prohibiting Blacks to reside here. Problem solved! (In the earliest version of our exclusion laws, Blacks were to be publicly whipped until they left.)

7. The justice system has punished people of color at much higher rates and with longer sentences than whites. There is a widely held belief that there are more Black men in prison than in college, a line used by then candidate Barack Obama in 2007. Turns out that the basis for the claim was incomplete data that left out a number of Black colleges and as many as 1000 schools that didn’t provide any data for the study, resulting in a serious undercount of Black men in college. While the truth is the reverse, more Black men in college than in prison, it is still true that people of color are incarcerated at much higher rates. (In 1994 John Ehrlichman confessed to Harper’s Magazine that Nixon’s “War on Drugs” was intentionally targeting the Black community for political gain.) Justice is supposed to be blind (treating everyone equally under the law) but too often it is blind to the way it perpetuates racial injustice.

8. Employment. Do I need to say anything about the barriers people of color have faced in the job market? Even if it were a non-issue today, and it isn’t, the historical record is crystal clear.

These are not radical claims. All are well established and should not be in dispute. And I haven’t even brought up health care, immigration policies, policing and many other issues. The point is, when you look at these together rather than as stand alone issues, you begin to see that they are all interconnected and are part of a larger system that has benefited one group at a cost to another. So I want to ask the politicians (virtually all Republican) who are enacting laws to prohibit the use of CRT in public schools, which of these things do you dispute? If you agree with the basic facts as outlined above, please explain how denying teachers the ability to use CRT in the classroom is not itself racist. I do not claim to be an expert on CRT so perhaps I am missing something, but I doubt it.

President Biden got it exactly right on Tuesday in Tulsa, saying that “only with truth can come healing and justice and repair.” To understand CRT you only need to look not just at what happened in Tulsa 100 years ago, but what happened in the days, the years and even the decades thereafter as it became the event that must not be named. First it was explained as a “race riot”, suggesting equal blame on each side. Then records were erased, insurance claims were denied and the story of the massacre was left out of most histories of the city and the state. I lived in Oklahoma for two years and never heard it mentioned, not even in my college course on American political history taught just 130 miles away. A former mayor of Tulsa said that she had never heard about it until long after becoming an adult. Ask yourself, when did you first learn of this massacre that also destroyed 35 entire blocks of businesses, churches and homes? It takes a whole system of silencers, not just a few racists, to cover up something that big.

Living in Germany for three years and learning much about Nazism and the Holocaust in the process, I also learned a great German concept: Auseinandersetzung. Literally it means “to set one from another” and is usually translated as “confrontation.” I learned it as having an Auseinandersetzung with one’s history, that is, to come to terms with an undesirable but undeniable past. The amazing organization which employed me, Aktion Sühnezeichen/Friedensdienste, was dedicated to making that Auseinandersetzung with Nazi Germany a reality for present day Germany. As part of my own education and training to work for the organization, I spent a month engaged in an Auseinandersetzung seminar with young Germans preparing to do voluntary work in the countries that were the former enemies of Germany. One week of that month was spend in Auschwitz, doing basic labor for the exhibits, reading SS files, watching films and visiting with survivors. It was a life-changing experience for all of us, and especially for those young Germans. The overwhelming response I heard from them was this: “We are not responsible for the sins of our parents and grandparents, but as Germans, we are responsible to see that such never happens again.” That kind of commitment only comes when you do the hard work of Auseinandersetzung.

What about us, have we done that work to come to terms with our history or have we largely swept it under the rug? Consider that we have had more years of slavery and Jim Crow than we have had of independence as a nation. (345 years from the arrival of the first slave ship to the Civl Rights Act.) Consider the number of monuments and locations dedicated to those who led an insurrection against the country in order to preserve “states rights”, the chief of which was slavery. (Even after the removal of many such monuments in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, there are still over 700 remaining and over 30 new ones that were created in the last two decades.) Consider that whereas Germany made it illegal to display the Nazi flag, in the U.S. the Confederate flag is still used as a symbol of pride, including at the Jan. 6 insurrection. (See Michele Norris’ excellent opinion piece on this topic in The Washington Post in which she discusses another German concept and what we can learn from their example.)

Two more stories of historical omissions, one from Tulsa’s neighbor to the south and the other from my home state. I grew up with Davey Crockett as one of my heroes. I even had the requisite coonskin hat! I was excited as a young adult to visit the Alamo, where, I had been told, he fought to his death for the freedom of Texas alongside William Travis and James Bowie. (There is good evidence that he was actually captured and executed after the battle.) Perhaps I was more enamored with the legend than the history, or maybe this little factoid was also kept quiet back then, but only recently did I learn that Travis and Bowie, those great heroes of Texian folklore, were slave owners (Bowie was also a slave trader) and that one major reason for the Texas revolt was the decision of Mexico seven years earlier to outlaw slavery. But who tells the story that the heroic defense of the Alamo was at least in part to preserve slavery in Texas? And why is it that being honest with ourselves about such history is interpreted as hating America?

Final story. Growing up in Oregon, except for three years in Iowa while in grade school, I had one year devoted to Oregon history in school. I only remember snippets now, but one of the big impressions made on me was another massacre, this of white missionary families by the members of the Cayuse people on the Columbia basin. Never mind that it took place near Walla Walla, it was on the Oregon Trail and hence part of our history. The Whitmans and their colleagues were, we more or less were taught, true pioneer heroes who helped put Oregon on the map. Interesting that we Oregon children at that time were taught about the Whitmans while Oklahoma children were not taught about Black Wall Street. What we were not taught, however, were the broken promises made to the Cayuse, the intentional efforts to poison some of the Cayuse by Dr. Whitman for taking food from the mission while the missionaries took lumber from lands claimed by the Cayuse (the former was “theft” by the Cayuse but the latter was the “right” of the missionaries), conflicts over the treatment Dr. Whitman did or did not provide for a measles outbreak (some claimed he did too little, others that he intentionally made it worse) and more. As I came to understand more of that story and of other Oregon pioneers, I also came to understand why those of Native American dissent celebrated when statues of those pioneers were torn down on the campus of the University of Oregon. (I understand it, but also don’t agree with the removal of the Pioneer Mother.) That’s not to justify the massacre of the Whitmans and company, but when you are only given part of the story, your view of history is distorted leading to all kinds of false conclusions.

Biden said it best in Tulsa: “We can’t just choose to learn what we want to know and not what we should know. We should know the good, the bad, everything. That’s what great nations do. They come to terms with their dark sides. And we’re a great nation.” At least we can be, and it begins with being honest about our history. Critical Race Theory may not get it all right, but it can help us be more honest about our past than we have been up to now.