The Moment in 1986 When Critical Race Theory Ousted the Civil Rights Movement

“Critical race theory isn’t so much a thing as a way of looking at a thing,” Kimberlé Crenshaw assured MSNBC host Joy Reid last month. Crenshaw is a law professor at UCLA who, as a law student at Harvard, was one of the founders of critical race theory in the 1980s. The cable news segment – headlined “The GOP’s Fact-Free Freakout Over Critical Race Theory” – portrayed CRT as unobjectionable: “It’s a way of looking at race,” Crenshaw said, smiling. “It’s a way of looking at why, after so many decades – centuries, actually – since the emancipation, we have patterns of inequality that are enduring.”

Crenshaw’s benign description has been adopted by many news outlets. They portray critical race theory as a rarefied tool used almost exclusively by law school professors, a “scholarly framework that describes how race, class, gender, and sexuality organize American life.” The claim that CRT is rarely taught outside the upper reaches of the academy is belied by numerous examples of its influence, including California's Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, a nearly 900-page teaching guide for K-12 educators adopted in March, which refers to CRT throughout. It says teachers and administrators “should familiarize themselves with current scholarly research around ethnic studies instruction,” notably “critical race theory.”