The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Arizona has joined over a dozen states to counter a perceived threat to the nation: so-called Critical Race Theory (CRT).
New laws bar government agencies and schools from placing any “form of blame or judgment on the basis of race, ethnicity or sex.” No individual, the law proclaims, should be made to feel discomfort, guilt or psychological stress because of race, ethnicity or sex.
State Representative Jake Hoffman, who pushed the bill to passage without public hearings, declared that “America is not racist.” Rather, since the Civil War, the nation has “stomped out racism” in all its forms. Rejecting efforts by “leftist activists” to “denigrate nearly every American citizen,” Hoffman explained, the law ensures that children learn that the United States has always been “accepting, diverse and loving.”
Similar legislation in Texas (where many legislators voiced outrage at a recent book, “Forget the Alamo,” that subverted the John Wayne film of the iconic battle by noting that the struggle to secure independence from Mexico was motivated partly by a desire to restore slavery) forbids public schools to deviate from teaching that progress toward individual freedom has always been the nation’s founding principle.
From this perspective, two-and-a-half centuries of slavery, the dispossession of Native Americans, a century of legalized post-slavery racial discrimination, and nearly a century of immigration restrictions targeting Asians, Eastern and Southern Europeans as inferior races were inconsequential deviations along the march toward freedom.
Yet, the new laws, like any list of historic outrages, are beside the point. Legislators in Arizona and Texas saw value in using CRT — much like bans on transgender athletes or allegations of voter fraud — as a cudgel to attack opponents and rally their base, even though few if any public schools actually taught it.
Originating decades ago as a concept among law school faculty, CRT does not attribute systemic racism to the beliefs or actions of individual whites. Nor does it attempt to “guilt trip” or indoctrinate public school children.
Rather, it is one method of examining how past and present legal, cultural and economic structures embody racist concepts that foster inequality. It can help explain the differential outcomes of laws and programs that ostensibly have little to do with race.
Take, for example, several popular federal programs adopted between the 1930s and 1980s, as well as local zoning laws. Although few explicitly targeted racial minorities, all sustained or exacerbated unequal racial outcomes. These include Social Security, the Fair Labor Standards Act, Public Housing Administration, the GI Bill, construction of the Federal Highway system and the war on drugs.
Enacted in 1935 to provide a lifeline to the elderly and disabled, Social Security remains a bedrock of the welfare state. But Congressional passage required liberal New Dealers to win support from many of the most conservative Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans.
The resulting law limited coverage largely to (overwhelmingly white) industrial and retail workers, while excluding (mostly Black and Latino) farm workers, sharecroppers and domestic workers.
Similarly, the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) enshrined principles of worker safety, the minimum wage, and overtime pay. But again, as the price of passage, the law denied these protections to most agricultural and domestic workers. Coverage expanded slowly, mostly in the 1950s and 1960s.
During the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration began using federal funds to promote housing construction. However, federal and state agencies, along with private lenders, adopted a practice known as “redlining,” which meant denying mortgages for Black families seeking to move into predominantly white neighborhoods.
This practice continued after World War II when the otherwise generous GI Bill subsidized private mortgages for veterans. Black GIs were eligible for mortgage assistance — so long as they remained in predominantly Black urban neighborhoods (where few single family homes existed), rather than the rapidly growing suburbs.
Similarly, Black veterans, who lived predominantly in the South, nominally enjoyed the same educational benefits as their white comrades — provided they could find one of the few Southern colleges willing to admit them.
These policies, nominally race-neutral, funneled white families into burgeoning communities such as Levittown, New York, and left cities poorer and more racially segregated, and limited Black access to higher education.
Construction of the Federal Interstate Highway system beginning in 1956 accelerated these trends. National and state governments spent huge sums constructing highways linking mostly white suburbs to cities — where commuters worked — while starving urban mass transit. Worse still, new highways often plowed through minority neighborhoods or separated established neighborhoods by color.
At the local level, nominally race-neutral zoning laws further enshrined patterns of residential segregation. In many of the nation’s suburbs, state and local authorities limited construction to relatively expensive single family dwellings while blocking efforts to construct more affordable multi-unit housing. In practice, this made it difficult for most inner-city Black and Latino families to re-locate into neighborhoods with better schools and jobs.
Finally, both drugs and the “war on drugs,” waged relentlessly from the 1970s until recently, devastated both white communities and those of color. But harsh laws championed by both major parties during the 1980s and 1990s resulted in sharply unequal outcomes.
For example, rates of drug use are largely equal across racial lines. However, rates of arrests, convictions, and sentencing for similar violations differ dramatically. Congress made this worse by deciding to punish one form of cocaine (crack), used predominantly by minorities, far more severely than powdered cocaine, used predominantly by whites. These and related policies resulted in rates of incarceration for Blacks at least five times that of whites.
Obviously not all disparities in income, wealth, education levels, housing, employment and incarceration can be attributed to conscious or unintentional racism. At the same time, it is impossible to ignore the impact of systemic racism in both history and our everyday lives.
Whether or not we use the term Critical Race Theory, healing our nation’s fractures requires understanding the sources of inequality, not demonizing or silencing classroom teachers.
