The following program is a PBS Wisconsin original production. Critical race theory, or CRT, isn't a new framework or way of thinking, but it has received renewed attention due to anti-CRT legislation created across the United States. So what is CRT exactly?
And why is it producing such a strong reaction in some states? So much that some lawmakers are pushing to ban teaching it in schools. Let's find out why race matters when it comes to history, racism, and education. Critical race theory, or CRT, can be a controversial buzzword today. But that wasn't always the case.
In fact, it isn't even a new concept. CRT dates back to the 1970s and 80s as a framework for legal analysis that was created by several legal scholars to suggest that race is a social construct and that racism is not merely individual bias or prejudice, but something embedded in systems, policies, and practices. CRT suggests that because racism is so deeply ingrained in the fabric of our nation, Even well-intentioned decisions made by individuals can help to fuel racism. And for some, therein lies the perceived controversy, resulting in the creation of anti-CRT legislation. In Wisconsin, the legislature passed a bill in January 2022 that would limit the discussion of racism in K-12 classrooms, including any teaching that, quote, an individual, by virtue of that individual's race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.
The bill was vetoed by Governor Tony Evers. Critics of anti-CRT legislation say that if America desires a more equitable future, then we must be willing to acknowledge the atrocities of the past and their influence on the present. National Academy of Education President and Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings joins us to share more about the importance of CRT and its application in and outside of the classroom.
So, Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, thank you so much for joining us today. My pleasure. So, can you start off by telling us a little bit about yourself and the work that you do? Well, I am Professor Emerita of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
And that's just a fancy way of saying I'm retired. But I will confess I am failing at it. I am the world's worst retiree.
I've been fascinated by the education of black people in this country because it's such an incredible story. And so where I see inequities in that education, I always want to kind of probe it and explore it and try to make sense of it. I appreciate you coming. to talk with us about a very important topic. For some it's the topic when it comes to race right now, CRT.
Well, and I want to be clear that the context that we are in right now, on the heels of some horrific massacres of people, mostly people of color, and clearly the one in Buffalo being driven by racial hatred, it's very timely to talk about this particular topic. But rather just saying to someone, oh, I study critical race theory or what what do you know about critical race theory? I often start with the question, tell me how you explain racial inequality. Because I think the explanation that one has really kind of makes them, you know, puts them in a context for understanding the world.
So if your explanation is, well, people just need to work harder, millions of people need to work harder? I mean, think about it. Think about it. If you start off by saying, well, there isn't any racial inequality, then I don't actually think I can have a debate with you because we don't see the world the same way.
on almost every social benefit, whether it is health, wealth, education, employment, we can see racialized disparity. So, how do we explain it? In a classroom with students, typically graduate students, I want to be clear, I would probably say something like, well, it's not as if we haven't had explanations. We have. From the time black people arrived on these shores to about the mid 20th century, 1950s, our explanation was pretty much biogenetic.
So ingrained in our thinking that many universities, many colleges, had departments and programs in eugenics. We said that was a science, that this group of people is biogenetically inferior. Now I would imagine that a lot of thinking people did not buy into that well before the 1950s. Hopefully. But...
I use the mid-1950s as a marker because it's at this point that we have the Brown decision. And Brown is a landmark decision. Everybody knows Brown versus the Board of Education. However, from a critical race theory perspective, we don't see it merely as an education decision.
We see it as a foreign policy decision. Because you have to put the legal cases, the Supreme Court cases, in a broader context. 1954 is the heart of the Cold War. And part of the propaganda that the then Soviet Union is using is to say to non-aligned nations like Angola or India, You don't want to be associated with the United States. Look what they do to people who look like you.
So that there's all these examples of lynching and dogs being sicked on people, failure to allow people to vote. So there is great pressure. on the nation. Right, we look bad. To look better, right?
Because the Soviets are exploiting this. I mean, you can find editorial cartoons, you can find op-eds all about, look how the United States treats black people. So it's not, it's why not only did the decision have to come out in favor of Linda Brown and the plaintiffs, it needed to be unanimous. It needed to make a statement. So at that point, we're saying the problem is not biogenetic.
The problem is lack of opportunity. That's a pretty good explanation. It is. Unfortunately, not long after that, Richard Nixon's administration, and in fact, I wrote a paper about the Brown decision in which I was able to find a statement from one of Nixon's part of his administration, H.R.
Charles Halderman, who was also disgraced in the Watergate scandal. But he tells, you have Halderman's diary in which he says. Nixon has told Mitchell, that's the Attorney General, to start filing cases to roll back Brown and keep filing it, filing them, until it's totally rolled back.
And so we have all these cases that come back. We have Milliken. We have Dow.
We have San Antonio versus Rodriguez. So the opportunity explanation is seemingly not holding up. Another example is voting rights.
1960s, right? Right. So that's an opportunity.
What is happening now? affirmative action. This is a Lyndon Johnson initiative.
And it has been fought over and over of the Fisher case, the Gratz and Grutter cases out of Michigan. So critical race theory comes along. And it comes along in the late 1970s. And that's part of the frustration for some is that this isn't a new argument.
This has been around for decades. No. And so when people say they're trying to foment a race. revolution.
I always say this is the slowest revolution I have been a part of. I will be dead before we have any movement. But critical race theory comes about in law schools at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where they held these critical legal studies conferences. Those were folks who said, you know, the way that law is taught and the way that we understand it doesn't take into consideration the...
situation and the condition of other people other than people who are already well established. And so it was mostly around people who were poor, women, and it was a group of black legal scholars as well as other scholars of color who said, you guys have forgotten about race. So, the critical race theorists emerge in these Wisconsin workshops.
What I find really interesting is people always want to make it sort of black-white issue. But I show people that among the major proponents are people like Richard Delgado, Marie Matsudo, Sumi Cho, Tomas Rivera. I mean, these are all folks who have done work in this area. They're not black. They're trying to figure out how do we explain persistent generational racial inequality.
So in short. For someone who's never heard of CRT or maybe has heard of it but doesn't really know what it means, what's the simple definition that you use to help people understand? Well, I try to tell people it is a legal look at racial inequality.
Its whole point is to try to explain the inequality, try to make sense of it, because it really... You know, after all these years of having been in this nation, you know, some of the longest standing people in the nation are black. You know, in some ways, I often say, who's more American than a black person?
Because we have deep and long roots here. So I think that the whole point of critical race theory is to try to make sense of why the inequality persists. So would you say that that is the current sort of reasoning that exists?
Like we've graduated from all of these other points in time. We had other ways of thinking about inequality to now it's systemic. There's an issue with the system. And we're saying it out loud.
I don't know if you remember, but not too long ago, one of the major advertisers, I can't even, I won't say it because I'll get it wrong. But some one of the major advertisers did an entire series called The Talk where black. Parents, you'd see these little snippets where black people would tell their children, if you get stopped by the police, be polite, don't let anybody call you such-and-such word.
Okay, when did we all get together and have this conversation? It turns out that that's part of our systemic understanding. of this is the way it works.
That, yeah, you do expect to have someone follow you around. Now, I remember teaching a class where students, you know, and my work is not to make students think like I think. My work is to make sure they think.
So I'm happy to hear a well-reasoned, well-thought-out, well-substantiated conservative argument about something. More so than a knee-jerk liberal one. I want you to be thinking. So we had a discussion once where a young lady talked about...
she was in a store, a local store, purchasing groceries, and she'd left her checkbook. And the manager or the cashier, I'm not sure who, told her, oh, not a problem, take your groceries, and when you come back by, you can pay. Well, a black student in this class said, well, that wouldn't happen to me.
And she said, no, it would, it would. You know, they're really nice there. And he says, I'm telling you, it would not happen.
So they went back and forth. And so he said, let's do this because I do live in your neighborhood. You know, we know each other.
The next time I need to go to the store, I'm going to call you. I'm going to have you go with me. And I'm going to purchase what I need to purchase, go through the cashier's line. But I'm going to say that I don't have my wallet.
They did it. And as soon as he said he didn't have his wallet, he was told, okay, well, put the groceries over there on the side, and then you go home and get your wallet. And then come back.
So she was mortified because it was this local family grocery. It wasn't a chain, right? And it was like, why would they let me just, you know? So it's those kinds of aha moments.
Often some colleagues and I say, you know, we'll call each other about something and someone will say. I had a CRT moment. In other words, it's just one of those things that's happened again. I so appreciate that example, not only because it's relatable, but because it does help to kind of simplify the conversation. Although I can see some people taking that, especially the grocery store example and saying, well, oh, that particular person that was working is racist.
versus calling attention to the system. So how would you help someone kind of delineate between like, there's individual racism, yes, we don't want to ignore that, but systemic racism is way more insidious in some ways because it can fall under the radar in ways we don't always recognize. Well, I don't deny individual racism, but racists grow up in a context. So let's go back to the Buffalo massacre in that.
That individual, yes, I'm going to buy that he's mentally ill. Anybody who would shoot up people like that is mentally ill. But what's the context that was feeding his mental illness? Well, when we check his computer, he's in all kinds of hate groups.
When we see the manifestos, what his whole point was. It's a both and situation. There are individual people who are racist, but there's a context that feeds into that racism that happens systematically.
And so I brought the individual racism part because I feel like that's... Somehow tied to the opposition like the current opposition because like you mentioned CRT is not new It's been around for decades It's provided a legit explanation behind why there are disparities still because some people like to believe that that was so long ago Why are we not XYZ? Well, the system didn't change this whole time So why would things generally improve for a group of people? The system was never designed to benefit but But I guess I'm curious, from your vantage point, why now? So let's be clear.
Much of what people are, quote, against is not critical race theory. When you say, oh, I'm against anything that's anti-racism, well, that's really not critical race theory. We've been doing anti-racist workshops for a very long time. When you say you don't want to have any discussion on race, when you say, we don't want white children to feel bad. You know, when I first heard that, I thought, well, my God, where were you in the 1950s and 60s when I was in school?
Because I had to sit through honors English classes reading Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn with the liberal use of the N-word and all of my white classmates. sniggling and giggling, right? I had to sit through Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. Nothing about education is about just making you feel comfortable.
Sometimes we learn the most in the midst of discomfort. So I think what's happened is this broad nest. NET has been cast.
And if you go back and look at some of the architects of the anti-CRT work, you see the strategy was brilliant. So you have someone like Christopher Ruffo, who is at the Manhattan Institute, who says... And I want to make sure I say say this pretty carefully.
But he says we're going to take all of the cultural insanities that Americans dislike. Now, think about that. What's a cultural insanity and who are the Americans?
Right. We're going to take all the cultural insanities that Americans dislike and lump them into the category of critical race theory. We're going to.
turn the brand. toxic. So now anything that deals with race, inequality, diversity, equity, inclusion, now all critical race theory. So when we can't talk about all of history, as James Baldwin says, he says, if you feel compelled to lie about any part of the history, you're likely to lie about it all. And that's the danger kind of, you mentioned the the danger of kind of compromising how we approach education and not only like demonizing history, but also demonizing the explanations that are made available as to why, why things are the way they are.
So then you have students coming into classrooms and teachers not being equipped to even discuss what's happening right now. So like, what can we offer if we can't talk about the reasons why these... Very impactful, triggering, traumatizing things are happening without those tools that we're saying no.
Right. And our founders, you know, these are these are really smart guys. These are smart men. Thomas Jefferson, someone I just find fascinating. I've got good things to tell you about Thomas Jefferson.
But there's contradictions because at the same moment he is writing these magnificent words, we hold these truths to be self-evident. He's got a woman, an enslaved woman, with whom he is procreating. I don't know what the nature of their relationship is, but I know that in his notes from Virginia, he talks about black people not being anywhere equal to white people and, uh, that the best thing we can do is just get rid of them.
Whoa, you're making more of them, you know. So there is this incredible contradiction. Should I not say that George Washington was number one more interested in farming than governing?
And that's pretty. pretty well documented. He wrote about back and forth to his farm every day that he was in the White House. Mount Vernon was his passion.
Should I not say that when he was president, and remember the Capitol was in Philadelphia at this time, it's not in Washington, D.C. Pennsylvania had an ordinance that said you could not, if you were enslaved and you came to Pennsylvania, at the end of 60 days you had to be manumitted, you had to be set free. Washington brought his slaves with him. to Philadelphia and on day 59 they went back to Maryland and then they came back then on day 61 and started the clock all over again. Now you've got to be thinking about this you can't just be thinking oh well you know okay so y'all are not you know slaves anymore. This these contradictions these human flaws are part of making these people real to our students and not turning them into idols.
Because I think the extremes can happen on either end because we're all flawed, whichever end of the spectrum we may land on. So I love that you highlight like, okay, there may be some good here or something here that is worth discussing, but let's not ignore, like you're saying, the flaws or the contradictions. I think it's important for us to understand that if we don't get to a place, Where we can actually hear one another, where we can actually express our deepest fears and concerns. We tear at the fabric of the nation, and CRT was never designed to do that. And for a special group who might just feel tired, like you said, this isn't anything new, this has been going on for so long, what would you say to that audience?
The historian in me always takes the long view. I am from a family in which my great grandparents were. chattel slavery, slaves. And I'm inspired by sort of the father of CRT, Derrick Bell, who says, just because something is impossible, doesn't mean it's not worth doing. So my great grandparents were in an impossible situation.
They were in bondage. But I bet every day they thought about, how can we get out of this? And so then my grandparents, on both sides, mother's side and father's side, were sharecroppers.
An impossible situation. You could never get out of sharecropping. You could never get ahead.
You could never own property. It was impossible. But they still fought against it.
Then my own parents. I grew up in state-sponsored segregation, legal apartheid. My mother could not try on a hat in a downtown department store. An impossible situation where you have to sit in the back of a bus and you have to knowingly go to a substandard school, if you got to go to school. Impossible.
But they fought against it. So then here I am. And in doubt.
professor with 10 honorary degrees. Go back to my great-grandparents, right? So people who are willing to fight against the impossibility, who understand that just because it's impossible doesn't mean it's not worth doing, is what encourages and empowers me to do what I love. emboldened me. My expectations for the next generation and the generation beyond that are quite high because I know we have this capacity.
In fact, our youth don't even think about race the same way we do. And so that's encouraging. Wow. You're making me tear up a little bit with your own, your breakdown, but that is so true. Thank you for that.
You're welcome. And with that, thank you so much for joining me today. I've so enjoyed our conversation. Thank you for having me.
Appreciate it. Thank you. Critical race theory is one framework to acknowledge the foundations of racism in the United States and its impact today. Regardless of any discussion around education policy, there is a painful yet very real history that exists for black Americans as well as other historically marginalized communities. This series is called Why Race Matters because we acknowledge that while highlighting those in our state working to hold systems, structures, and ourselves accountable to create a more equitable Wisconsin.
Watch additional episodes at pbswisconsin.org slash whyracematters. Funding for Why Race Matters is provided by Park Bank, Huna Mutual Group, Madison Area Technical College, Alliance Energy, UW Health, Focus Fund for Wisconsin Programs, and Friends of PBS Wisconsin.