The Forum

During the past two years of sustained assault on the basic conduct of historical scholarship and equity-minded critical inquiry from the right, American institutions of higher learning have struggled to find a clear voice and footing in the debate. Seeing public K-12 schools absorb the brunt of gag orders and book bans targeting honest reckonings with our racial past, many universities have either stood aghast in uncomprehending horror, or indulged the fantasy that they might somehow be insulated from the rolling crusade of racial backlash at the base of the white nationalist right.

This posture is lacking in many ways—particularly since the lead intellectual movement drawing fire in this latest racialized culture war is critical race theory (CRT), a discipline that is intimately bound up with the democratic promise of higher education in America. In the final days of his administration, President Donald Trump unleashed the political assault on CRT with Executive Order 13950. Trump’s order—drafted after his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows consulted with CRT-baiting Manhattan institute fellow Christopher Rufo in the wake of Rufo’s appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program, erroneously defined Critical Race Theory  (“CRT”) as a “malign ideology that undermines the inherent equality of every individual in America.” The since revoked Executive Order 13950, together with the abortive the 1776 blueprint project seeking to rebut the scholarship featured in the New York Times’ landmark 1619 Project on the deep resonance of slavery in America’s ongoing political and economic life, have since metastasized into a nationwide crusade against the fabricated vision of CRT first promulgated in Trump’s order. The basic outlines of these executive-branch assaults on truthful intellectual inquiry are now replicated in scores of state-level bills targeting, distorting, and maligning CRT for the purpose of riling populist voters to augment the Trump base in anticipation of the next election cycle.

To better grasp the roots of this dynamic, we must take a clear-eyed assessment of the connection between EO 13950, the populist attacks on CRT, and the great counterfactual myth at the heart of Trumpian political activism: the big lie about the outcome of the 2020 presidential balloting that triggered the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 2, 2021. The purpose of EO 13950 was to ban any speech critiquing structural racism—itself a direct and dangerous assault on  democracy. The executive order represented a codification of the use of state power to silence oppositional voices. And the same underlying derangement of democratic inquiry drove the Jan. 6 uprising: When the American people spoke in the 2020 election, Joe Biden was elected president. Trump and his supporters—prioritizing the maintenance of power and white patriarchy—resorted to violence. Out of this militant expression of white nationalist political impunity, the attacks on critical race theory intensified, now seeking to exploit and perpetuate fear based upon difference at all levels of political debate. The two-fold goal of this divisive strategy was, and remains, to push the ranks of populist voters to cast ballots for Republicans, while at the same time discrediting CRT, specifically, and intellectualism, generally.

The intellectual stakes of this demagogic strategy become clearer when we revisit the basics of the critical race theory engagement with traditional race liberalism. Critical race theory—though widespread and used in many disciplines for more than four decades—originated in the legal academy. Beginning in the 1970s, a racially and ethnically diverse group of legal scholars, called critical race theorists, created frameworks for understanding how race and racial subordination have shaped and continue to shape law and society. Scholars using the CRT framework have sought to explain and illustrate how structural racism produces racial inequity and inequality within our social, economic, political, legal, and educational systems. They have detailed how this can occur even absent individual racist intent. These pioneering legal scholars have gone on to address the ways in which racism is interwoven with sexism, class domination, and homophobia, among other exclusionary systems.

In her 2016 essay in the Journal of Legal Education, Professor Adrien Wing asked: “Is there a future for Critical Race Theory?” She replied resoundingly in the affirmative, and set forth a prescient argument spelling out exactly why CRT cannot be treated as a fringe subject. In fact, if the current attacks on CRT were not so grotesque, distorted, and mischaracterized, the surfacing of CRT in mainstream media outlets could be said to validate the importance of the theory: It is a powerful means of untangling, and understanding at a deeper level, the building blocks of reasoned, democratic discourse about the reality of racism and the need to focus on anti-subordination and anti-oppression in the pursuit of racial justice. The conditions of the attack on CRT, in other words, serve as a direct proof of the terms of its critique.

This stark new state of political affairs presents an urgent challenge to our institutions of higher education. There is a constant tension within and outside of these institutions; most notably, between the reassertion of white dominance and the retention of power on one end of the spectrum, and the struggle to change systems, culture, and power relationships on the other. Scholars and citizens residing at points in between these two poles appear to be waning in their leadership capacities and influence, signaling a profound conceptual breaking point. This breaking point is what now imperils American democracy, as has become unmistakably clear during the campaign of state-sponsored censorship targeting critical race theory. The fervor to elect conservative school board members nationwide under the guise of reforming the public education system is at bottom a campaign to resurrect a mythic past of untroubled white impunity; it promotes a revisionist American history intended to erase America’s continuing legacy of racial hierarchy, subordination, and oppression. The scapegoating tactics targeting CRT are plainly bids to whitewash history in the service of a contemporary agenda of antidemocratic racial retrenchment—they seek to disempower and disfranchise minoritized people while distracting populist voters from seeking meaningful economic, social, legal, and political reforms.

One telling illustration the political goal of this distraction campaign is hiding in plain sight: the stated objective of this anti-truth movement is to “abolish critical race theory and ‘The 1619 Project’ from the public school curriculum.”  In other words, the prime directives that could not be accomplished by EO 13950 are now getting approved as state legislation; specifically, through measures known as punitive memory laws.

Memory laws come in different types and are enacted to address the historical record or the shared perception of the past. Memory laws can be used to achieve varied purposes. With respect to EO 13950 and state legislation banning or proposing to ban CRT, these measures seek to ban a negative perception of a violent past, in this case America’s history with slavery. These  types of memory laws are undemocratic, as they are imposed “to limit public debate on the national past by banning oppositional or minority views, in contrast to the principles of free speech and deliberative democracy.” Memory laws have the potential to create a body of legally defined and legally enforced knowledge that a government—in this case, state governments endorsing bans on the teaching of CRT—protects from public scrutiny. This act of intellectual isolation becomes in short order an act of intellectual quarantine, removing the stigmatized  knowledge from the realm of historical dispute. In this case, state legislation proposing bans on teaching CRT are meant to elevate a whitewashed history of America’s complicity with slavery and genocide, generally, and its maintenance of systemic racism, oppression, and subordination, specifically.

State-sanctioned, punitive memory laws amount to self-serving attempts to apply self-exculpatory legislation to protect states from criticisms of systemic racial inequality. Apart from doubling as political theater—dangerously so, in the wake of Jan. 6—the use of punitive memory laws deprives historians, citizens, residents, journalists, and minoritized people the right to challenge constructed histories in some cases and flagrantly false, redemptive histories in other cases. Moreover, memory laws create a tension between principles of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and academic freedom on the one hand, and the policies, processes, and procedures a government seeks to promote on the other. The tension escalates when memory laws include punishment: this feature creates a chilling effect on individuals and institutions who would otherwise seek to engage in open debate in furtherance of a pluralistic society.

Thus, the resulting attacks on CRT are themselves undemocratic and indicative of a larger frontal assault from the right on progressive higher education and intellectualism. The attack on CRT is doubly damaging in the sense that white dominance and the power that its adherents wield go unchecked. This self-reinforcing logic allows white supremacy to be built, rebuilt, and reinforced to protect and promote the status quo, while law and the legal system further embed white dominance through constructs such as colorblind jurisprudence or through codification of state power to silence oppositional voices. Just as EO 13950 suppressed antiracist speech until its revocation upon President Biden legitimately taking office, state legislatures are using their collective power to silence those who would learn how to critique systemic racism and inequality in America by deploying the lessons of critical race theory. Unequivocally, federal, state, local, and municipal government level attempts to ban CRT are censorship.

This is the point at which higher education institutions must be on guard. Professor Cheryl Harris explains that “any kind of thought or speech that attempts to pierce ignorance, is by its very nature a radical ideology that white hierarchy is driven to suppress.” This means that universities committed to pluralism are targets of the new McCarthy-like inquisition. Nearly all the states in our nation have proposed bills to ban CRT. The legislative bans on CRT are not only meant to silence antiracist speech, but also to perpetuate ignorance—all for the purpose of scaffolding the continued escalation of systemic inequality.

The attacks on CRT are meant to create political unity in the alt-right, while also pushing back against unified movements to eradicate structural, institutional, and systemic racism. CRT is under attack because it creates a path for knowledge acquisition—especially within higher education institutions—about established facts that reasonably and rationally explain the durability of systemic racial inequality. Pulling CRT out of the context of higher education institutions and mischaracterizing it in mainstream political rhetoric to mobilize right-wing ideologues and their followers draws on the longstanding tradition in our racialized politics of training white rage on fictionalized bogeyman figures. This ever-useful boogeyman stokes the power and feeds fears of demographic displacement among those who identify with the dominant white hierarchy. This side of America thus becomes further entrenched in the anti-intellectual traditions of American culture—which serves to directly discredit higher education  institutions, the very places where new generations of learners go to practice and master critical thinking.

Higher education institutions committed to academic freedom—which by definition includes engagement and discourse with CRT—are in the crosshairs precisely because they teach critical inquiry that facilitates deeper understandings about human hierarchy and the construction of history. Critical inquiry about human hierarchy indeed sets the groundwork for contesting the myth that America is a heroic nation built on liberty and justice for all. The response from higher education institutions must account for the reality that not all Americans are having the same experiences, nor are all Americans immune to blind spots when it comes to awareness and  acknowledgement of systemic inequity.

This is exactly the reason higher education institutions must respond with greater, not fewer, opportunities to lean into discourses such as critical race theory, which examine and interrogate, among other things, the built environments and structures that perpetuate racial disparities and racial hierarchies. CRT and its principles stand at the center of today’s most prominent social movements. At the exact same time, simply talking about race, racism, and America’s history with slavery threatens to label the speaker as un-American. For this very reason, CRT must be understood and defended as a core bulwark of free inquiry in our institutions of higher education.

The ultimate objective of EO 13950 was to attack higher education institutions because they are the sites that generate the knowledge of CRT. Conservative strategies to maintain racial  hierarchy and white supremacy are shifting and changing at extreme speeds. To respond effectively, higher education institutions must support new, innovative, and disruptive ways of engaging with struggle, contestation, and resistance to continue the teaching and learning of antiracism, anti-subordination, and anti-oppression. The work to be done includes marshaling the resources within institutions of higher learning to create and sustain strong coalitions committed to truth and reconciliation. Our colleges and universities must reclaim their rightful place at the vanguard of the battle to create a future focused on and committed to building structural, institutional, and systemic equity into American society.