America & Critical Race Theory

By: Ariel Blanks

Growing up in a country like America, we are raised to believe that we are a nation with “liberty and justice for all.” That promise that the Pledge so proudly proclaims was broken at a young age when I was told in the most kid-friendly way possible that I was black. Years later, as I sit and watch the news, it sets in that America is not the patriotic wonderland that it is portrayed to be. It is a country with so many divides, fractures, and flaws. Hearing the attacks on critical race theory merely strengthened the feeling of a broken America, a version of America that does not want to acknowledge its past and instead erases it or glosses it over. The active erasure of America’s violent past gives us a reason to pay attention to the theory that so many states are banning critical race theory. 

Critical race theory is centered around the idea that race is a social construct and that racism is systemic in nature and is embedded in our nation’s institutions. It argues that the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, etc. Continue to be sewed into the fabric of our red, white, and blue flag. Professor Kemberlé Crenshaw, one of the early developers of CRT, says that it is more of a verb than a noun, “It is a way of seeing, attending to, accounting for, tracing and analyzing the ways that race is produced, the ways that racial inequality is facilitated, and the ways that our history has created these inequalities that now can be almost effortlessly reproduced unless we attend to the existence of these inequalities.”

So, if CRT is all about acknowledging our nation’s past and working to reform it, why is there so much backlash? 

To put it simply, critical race theory is being used as a political weapon. It is being used as a political punching bag that politicians purposely use as a prop to manipulate the usually uneducated masses. Many people did not even know what critical race theory was when it first started popping up in mainstream media - and they still do not know. They use the term like a slur and describe it as “Anti-American”, banking on the idea that those who listen to their rhetoric won’t educate themselves.

Many people who are opposed to CRT see it as an effort to completely rewrite American history and to paint all white people as racists who should feel guilty because they have systemic advantages. 

This point of view, particularly, shows how as Americans we are conditioned to believe what is put in front of us instead of looking in between the lines. We immediately jump to conclusions when even hearing a mutter of the word “race” without any afterthought. 

We also see that the loudest voices are those who may not have ever experienced discrimination on a systemic level. They never had to worry about being pulled over by the police. They never had their parents have a talk with them about how they have to work 10 times harder just to be acknowledged. Those same people, who turn school board meetings into battlefields do not know the impact of being allowed to go to school or vote. 

The uproar that we see, whether it be from news outlets like Fox News, from outraged parents claiming that their child is being indoctrinated, or even from a presidential candidate, comes from a place that will never know how it feels to be a non-white person in America, and will not acknowledge the experiences of non-white people in America. People do not know how to come to terms with America’s past. But, if we cannot come to terms with the past, how can we move forward as a country and look toward the future?