Critical Race Theory, an Overview. Law professor Derrick Bell laid the foundation for critical race theory. In 1976, he published an article in the Yale Review titled, Serving Two Masters, Integration Ideas and Client Interests in School Desegregation. Professor Bell questioned whether the civil rights movement goals, even if accomplished, could eradicate racism and inequality. What is critical race theory?
Critical race theory is an academic discipline which maintains that society is divided along racial lines into white, oppressors, and black, victims, similar to the way Marxism frames the oppressor-victim dichotomy along class lines. Critical race theory framework is comprised of five tenets. 1. Counter-storytelling 2. The permanence of racism 3. Whiteness as property 4. Interest Conversion 5. Critique of Liberalism A lot of spacious sky, for amber waves of rain, for purple clouds of light, for the The majesty of the cruiser.
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. America, I love you, America God, I'll share your grace On me And for all my good With your other hand I'll see you again To shine with me To shine with me To shine with me It's black racism, it's permanent, you know what I'm talking about. I think that telling the truth as you see it is never discouraging.
It can be enlightening to really know this little white guy up in Boston. who must be in his late 80s now, but is still on the case. And he wrote me after he read The Faces of the Bottom of the Well, talking about this permanence of racism.
He said, you know, Derrick, when Howard Selden was his name, You know, when people used to ask me how long is racism going to last, I would say 400 years. But I wouldn't believe it, and it wouldn't be satisfying to them. And he said, then I read your book.
And he said, I got it. I got it. Racism is permanent. It's always going to be here. And he said he was free.
He had this little office. I guess he had some trust money. He had this little civil rights office. He'd been running for years. And now he's going to all his friends and he said, you know, racism is permanent.
He said he recognized that if you looked at it that way, then when you had a little success, you could celebrate it. But when you had the setbacks and defeats, you weren't defeated. Because this was. part of the thing.
He kept going. He said his example was the alcoholic. That in order for the alcoholic going to the various sessions, to start getting a grip on it, is to stand and say, I am John Jones, I'm an alcoholic, I will always be an alcoholic. But today...
I'm going to try to get through without taking a drink. Critical race theory contends that America is permanently racist to its core and that consequently the nation's legal structures are, by definition, racist and involved. Emory University professor Dorothy Brown states, Critical race theory seeks to highlight the ways in which the law is not neutral and objective, but designed to support white supremacy and the subordination of people of color.
The amazing thing, and you get this in reading Bob Carter's book, is the strength of the belief in the law. That if you once got the court to say officially what we knew from experience, that then there would be compliance. That white folk who had been benefiting would now...
If the law was clear, if the court had spoken, would, with some, you know, foot-dragging and all, go along with the law? Thurgood said schools would be desegregated in five years. He knew there was going to be trouble.
Bill Hastie, who was really, I mean, he was the epitome of the talented 10th, that Du Bois thought was the future of the race until he got a little further along and decided they were not going to be the future. And when I went to see Bill Hastie after law school and told him I wanted to be a civil rights lawyer, he said, son, it's praiseworthy, praiseworthy. But you know, the Brown decision was handed down two, three years ago.
There's some mopping up to be done, but basically you were born 15 years too late. He said that seriously. It wasn't a joke. So that I'm not saying this in defense or sort of consolation. But we all believe that this society, when the court spoke, was going to shift.
And Carter writes years later that we thought segregation was the evil. We came to see that segregation was a manifestation of the real evil racism. And racism is more than just bad white folk hating black folk. It is a, it is a. major underpinning of this capitalist society.
Of control. Of control of both blacks and whites. Yes. And don't we see that today? Don't we ever.
And so the great challenge, what I do with my students, particularly the white students, I want to work in civil rights. What should I do? I said the great challenge today is to get white folks to acknowledge the benefits of racism and to see that it comes at too high.
I was an American. I had the flag up on 4th of July. I was in the Boy Scouts. I was in the Civil Air Patrol in uniform. Everybody talks about justice.
Those who have known it least, believe it most. The critical race theory is a legal perspective that argues that racism is normal, not aberrant, in U.S. society. Now, people hate that I say that.
They hate it, hate it, hate it. But that's what critical race theorists believe. So that when racial...
incidents happen we go duh because they happen all the time. Now while it is true that we will rally around major incidents like what's now happening in Samford, Florida around Trayvon Martin. It's really not that that people deal with.
What they deal with are what I call the thousand daily cuts, the everydayness of it. The going into a store looking at a purse in a display case and being told that's very expensive. As if to say, you can't afford this. I tell my students all the time, if you knew how much expensive crap black women have, they don't really...
want to buy it but someone said oh that's expensive and so in some ways you know we get goaded into buying it because it's like you know well I can afford this it's those things day in and day out someone's inability to look you in the face someone not trusting you over something you know clutching their purse I mean I have three sons who are three of the most lovely young men you ever want to meet but if they get into an elevator it's not unusual for somebody to clutch their purse and assume the worst. So that's really about the dailiness, and that is, quote, normal. It's not aberrant.
It's not like, oh, we had a racial incident. We have them all the time. It further argues that narratives, or more specifically, counter narratives, are useful ways of understanding how racism operates and functions. So in other words, people tell stories to tell what happened and to try to set a context for how racism impacts them. Critical race theory also employs critical social science as a knowledge base rather than just case law.
Because remember, this is scholarship that comes out of legal scholarship. But these are legal scholars who are also using social sciences. They're using political science and sociology and anthropology and psychology. And it contends that civil rights legislation only survives if it can advantage whites, and that for people of color to benefit from legislative and policy decisions, they have to find an interest convergence. In a little tent, oh and just like the river I've been running, ever since.
It's been a long, a long time coming, but I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will. It's been too hard living, but I'm afraid to die, cause I don't know what's up there. Beyond the sky.
It's been a long, a long time coming. But I know a change gonna come. Yes it will I go To the movie And I go Downtown Downtown Somebody keep telling me don't hang around It's been a long, a long time coming But I know The change gonna come, oh yes it will....at Herrington Time School, 425. My name is Jackson Langboard. I'm 18 year old and I'm a senior at McLean High School. For academic subjects, I am...
in Advanced Placement Literature, English, Advanced Placement US Government, Biology, and Comparative Government, Art, Advanced Placement Music Theory, Health, Geosystems for Science, and Algebra, Men's Chorus, Leadership, and Technical Theatre. I drive and I get here half an hour before school starts every day just for the fun of it. Trying to park here if you come in at normal time is really awful. You end up parking like half a mile away. A lot of students will go to a school all the way across town who catch two or three buses and a subway just to get to school.
And I think that, you know, if we have to travel that far to seek education, then we should be able to travel for free. The kids here are... are motivated in just about everything.
They're motivated to even learn, which is scary to hear for a high school kid. They're motivated to succeed in sports, extracurriculars, anything. I think they're most willing to learn.
A lot of them. They just don't find school interesting no more because they don't have the power to do anything when you say so in the classroom. This is our auditorium theater. We have lights, standard light sounds.
Not particularly high tech, but we have a nice system. Hands go to the metal detector. They use this to try to keep schools safe, but obviously it doesn't work because even when someone walks through and it beeps, they don't even search them or anything. They just say, okay, walk back through, empty your pockets. That's all they do.
This is our new studio. It's one of three high schools in the county that has it. Hey, orchestra, can you start playing?
It's all kids. It's all run. It's all performed.
It's all produced by kids. Well. Well, one thing with these walls, like, they really need to be repainted because of the graffiti. As you can see here, they tried to repaint it, but it doesn't blend in. You can actually tell they just, like, really just gave up on repainting the walls.
Every teacher in this school buys their own school supplies. And it's actually very sad because, like, the school system should have money to, you know, provide for those school supplies for students, but they don't. And the teachers have to come out of debt paychecks just to, you know, be able to support their students. That's our observatory.
It just needs to... a giant dome telescope and you could see the entire sky from there. If every school in the country can be like McLean, I think it's really going to increase the standard of living, just going to make things a lot better.
Obviously it's not fair. I mean we have not even half of what they have. I mean we're all students, why shouldn't we receive the things that they have?
I mean we're all trying to learn, we all want to grow up to be something, so why shouldn't we receive the same advantages they have? I don't understand that. Critical race theorists are exploring inequities in public schools and the impact on student achievement. Questions for future research include, is there some minimum level of competency that public supported schools should legally expect? And two, what sanctions are available to citizens when schools fail to live up to their end of the contract?
Yes, you can call him many things. He's been called a poet, an essayist, a playwright, a novelist, an activist, and you can call him all those things and you'd be absolutely correct. But that's just scratching the tip of the iceberg.
Over 13 published volumes of poems, 20 plays, 3 jazz operas, and the list goes on and on and on and on and on. So, without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, legendary Amiri Baraka. This is an excerpt from a poem called Why is we Americans?
But reality is an excerpt on television. Why is we Americans? Why is we Americans? Booty da Booty da Booty da Booty da What I want is me, for real. I want me and myself and what that is is what I be and what I see and feel and who is me and what it is and who it is and when it me is what it be.
I'm going to be here if I want, like I said, self-determination. But I ain't come from a foolish tribe. We wants the mule, the land. You can make it 300 years of blue chip stock in the entire operation.
We want to be paid in a central bank. The average worker farmer wage for all those years we gave it free. Plus we want damages. For all the killings and the fraud, the lynchings, the missing justice, the lies and frame-ups, the unwarranted jailings, the tar and feathering, the character and race assassinations, historical slander, ugly caricatures. For every Sambo, step and fetch it, flick, we want to be paid.
For every hurtful thing you did or said, for all the land you took, for all the rapes, all the rosewoods and black Wall Street you destroyed, all the miseducation, jobs lost, segregated shacks we lived in, the disease that ate and killed us. For all the mad police that drilled us, for all the music and dances you stole, the styles, the language, the hip clothes you copped, the careers you stopped, all these are suits. Specific litigation as represent we, be like we for reparations for damages paid to the Afro-American nation.
Boudida, Boudida, Boudida. We want education for all of us and anyone else in a black pelt hurt by slavery. For all the native peoples.
them poor white people you show all the time is funny. All them Abner's and Daisy Mays, them Beverly Hillbillies who never got to know Beverly Hills, who never got to Harvard on their grandfather's wills. We want reparations for them, right on, for the Mexicans whose land you stole, for all of North Mexico. You call it Texas, Arizona, California, New Mexico, Colorado, all that, all that, all that, all that. Do it it bap bap bap bap All that you got to give up Autonomy and reparations to the Chicano's And the Native Americans whose soul you ripped out with their land Give self determination regional autonomy That's what my we is asking And they gonna do the same when they demanded like us again in their own exploited name.
Yeah, the education, that's right. 200 years. We want a central stash, a central bank with democratically elected trustees and a board elected by us all to map out from the referendum we set up what we want to spend it on to build. that Malcolm sent self-determination as self-reliance and self-respect and self-defense, the will of what the good Dr. Du Bois beat on, true self-consciousness, simply the psychology of freedom. Bo-dee-da, bo-dee-da, bo-dee-da, bo-dee-da, bo-dee-da, bo-dee-da, bo-dee-da, bo-dee-da.
Then we can talk about being American. Then we can... can listen then we can listen without the undercurrent of desire to first set your ass on fire we will only talk a voluntary unity of autonomy as vective arms of self-determination if there is democracy in you that is where it will be shown this is the only way we as Americans this is the only truth that can be told otherwise there is no future between us but war and we is rather lovers and singers and dancers and poets and drummers and actors and runners and elegant heartbeats of the sun's flame but we is also at the end of our silence and sit down we is at the end of being under your ignorant smell your intentional hell either give us our lives or plan to forfeit your own