Together, the bills amount to a Republican scare tactic and disinformation campaign, and critical race theory has in some circles become a dog whistle that communicates resistance toward racial justice progress. Others reflect calls by Trump for “patriotic education,” or instruction that doesn’t stray from the traditional telling of American history (think: the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson, and the fight to make the greatest country in the world).
Some bills specifically want to prevent the teaching of the New York Times’s 1619 Project - a sweeping collection of essays and literary works that center Black Americans’ founding contributions to the country via enslavement - which conservatives have scrutinized since it was first published in 2019. A bulk of the bills include vague language, calling for a ban on what they call “race and sex stereotyping” or “race or sex scapegoating,” meaning they want to stop instruction that makes “value judgments” that lead to, for example, white men writing apology letters, as Russell Vought, a conservative activist whose organization has written model legislation for these bills, told Vox. Many focus on public grade schools, while some target community colleges, universities, state government entities, contracts, grant recipients, and private schools. While they don’t all name critical race theory - which in and of itself is not being taught in many, if any, K-12 schools - the new state bills rest on the same foundation: the desire to broadly stop teaching and training on “divisive concepts.” Christina Animashaun/Vox His exit from office didn’t put an end to the assault on critical race theory, though - it only amplified it.īy January, GOP lawmakers began quietly drafting and introducing bills that mirrored one another in an effort to stop schools from teaching about racism or any topics that confront America’s history of racial and gender oppression.
Though the school of thought had been relatively obscure outside of academia, a conservative campaign was launched against it, and by September, then-President Donald Trump had signed an executive order restricting implicit bias and diversity trainings by government agencies. It all began as racial justice protests took off across the country in the summer of 2020 and a Fox News story fashioned critical race theory as a boogeyman. Over the past six months, Republicans in more than two dozen states have proposed bills that aim to stymie educational discussions about race, racism, and systemic oppression in the US - potentially eliminating the conversations altogether. It is just now receiving widespread attention because it has morphed into a catchall category, one used by Republicans who want to ban anti-racist teachings and trainings in classrooms and workplaces across the country. Watching the news or browsing social media, it would be easy to think that critical race theory is a complicated, controversial, or new idea.īut critical race theory, created four decades ago by legal scholars, is an academic framework for examining how racism is embedded in America’s laws and institutions.