The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 4: Critical Race Theory Doesn't Belong in the Classroom

Mike: No critical race theory isn't racism; though it's cute you think that.

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Mike: Thank you so much for joining us for our Juneteenth episode. I'm joined by two scholars today to talk about critical race theory in education. Marvin Lynn is the dean of the College of Education at Portland State University with his Ph.D. from UCLA in social sciences and education. Adrienne Dixson is a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Champaign with her Ph.D. in multicultural education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Together, they are the editors of The Handbook of Critical Race Theory in Education, an edited volume now in its second edition with contributors from many illustrious scholars in the field of critical race theory and critical race pedagogy. Thank you both for joining me on The Nazi Lies Podcast.

Adrienne Dixson: Thank you.

Mike: Okay. So, let's start out with the very basics: what is critical race theory and why is it here?

Marvin Lynn: Well, I think about critical race theory as a subfield within the law that is very focused on how race and racism are represented within the legal structure but also within the application of law in the United States. And legal scholars have been very interested in kind of documenting that historically, but also looking at the ways in which the law is unfortunately limited when it comes to protecting particularly racially marginalized people such as African Americans and so there's lots of examples of that as well. So, that's how I would describe it. It's a body of scholarship that comes out of the law.

Education scholars like myself and Adrienne have been drawing on this for many years, to try to think about how we talk about and theorize about schools and what happens in schools, particularly as it pertains to students of color and gaps in educational attainment and achievement for example. We look at classrooms; we look at curriculum; we look at policies both in higher education and in K-12 context, and we are trying to understand how race and racism are shaping all of those factors.

There's a whole number of tenets that we could describe for you that sort of reflect the principles and the values of critical race theory. For example, this idea of the permanence of racism is an idea authored by Derrick Bell who many considered to be the father of critical race theory. And he argues that racism is a permanent feature of American society because of the way in which the society was structured and so on. I should say there is some disagreement about that within the field. There are other critical race theorists who are a little bit more hopeful than that.

Another principle of critical race theory that you often hear about is intersectionality that comes out of Kimberlé Crenshaw's work, for example. And that's the idea that we have to understand the sort of unique ways in which folks of color are positioned within the racial hierarchy. So with black women, for example, are both gendered and raced, and those things cannot be separated as we consider their experiences with marginalization in our society. There are examples of court cases that have really gotten it wrong and have not been able to figure out how to really think about those things in tandem with each other, and Kimberlé Crenshaw writes about that problem. So, there are a number of other tenets that I could speak about, but those are two that I think probably people hear about the most.

Mike: Dr. Dixson, do you have anything to add?

Adrienne: I agree with what Marvin said for the most part, I think. I would want to kind of underscore in explaining what critical race theory is. For people who study discrimination or racism, it's an analytical or a theoretical frame. For most of us who identify as critical race theorists, it is more than a theoretical framework. It is a perspective on how race and racism, opportunity and inopportunity operate in the US that's grounded in a history of oppressing people of color. And that history is documented, so it's not theoretical; it's not something that is a figment of one's imagination; it is documented history.

One of the things that we try to understand is that even in spite of interventions to address that history or redress that history, we still find ourselves with kind of chronic disparities that map onto race. And so what we endeavor to do is to try to understand, well, if the legal obstacles, the de jure obstacles to opportunity, to voting, to schooling, to buying homes, to employment, if the de jure obstacles are eradicated, what accounts for the underrepresentation or the lack of opportunity? And that's where, as critical race theorists, we look at kind of how these historical scripts that emanate from de jure discrimination, how the remnants of that have found their way into our modern day kind of policy making.

So what are the kind of common sense, traditional, normal, if you will, rhetorics that we hold about people's ability and their capacity and their fit, their right, who deserves to be in, who deserves to be at an Ivy League, who deserves to be a dean, who deserves to be a professor, that kind of normality, if you will, or rhetorics about that are steeped in these histories of oppressing people of color, against white women, against people who have disabilities, against people who don't speak English as their first language, against people who identify differently from us, gender, sexuality, so we try to understand the persistence of oppressions and again, inequalities.

Mike: Okay. So even though critical race theory hasn't had the public spotlight for very long, there's already quite a cornucopia of Nazi lies surrounding it. So browsing the neo-Nazi forum, Stormfront, yields reams of results. Apparently, the Nazis have folded the critical race theory into their whole cultural Marxism conspiracy theory. One poster on the forum describes critical race theory as, "Cultural Marxism applied to law to benefit blacks and browns," that's his exact quote, "while penalizing whites." The poster then goes on to lament that it is targeting white children and even white babies. (Not sure how.) I'm not interested in having you answer to that, but what I do want to talk about is why critical race theory belongs in the classroom.

Adrienne: Yeah, well, again, I'll say it's a framing of trying to understand the persistence of inequalities. I don't know that– We've had colleagues who have tried to think and present multiple histories by centering kind of different experiences of people of color. So I think this kind of critical examination of race and racism in the US can be helpful. But I hasten to say that we're teaching critical race theory because it lends itself to this kind of hysteria, and I don't know that we've done enough thinking around what and if it's appropriate in a K-12 classroom. And by appropriate, I don't mean because kids can't handle it. I mean, how do we kind of structure curriculum in a way that maximizes the teaching and learning for kids through a critical race theory lens. So we haven't "tested" any of that, so I would say maybe it's an outlook on the US that one may be inclined to, but I don't know that it's in the classroom. And I'm not saying that it's not appropriate or it is appropriate, I just don't think we're there yet.

Mike: Okay. Marvin, do you have anything to add?

Marvin: Yeah, I would agree. I have been asked this question over and over and over again, particularly by conservative news outlets who want to claim that critical race theory is everywhere. And, you know, I watched a YouTube video today by Christopher Rufo, who really is the architect of this war against critical race theory. And it started with his friend Trump in the White House and in the executive ban last year, and it has continued with legislation all across the nation and kind of media attacks and school board wars and all kinds of things that are going on. And one of the things that he says is that critical race theory is synonymous with equity; it's synonymous with social justice; it's synonymous with a whole variety of terms and concepts and ideas that we've been using for a very long time in education that are not born of critical race theory.

Teachers, for example, have been trying to do what James Banks refers to. James Banks is a multicultural education scholar. In fact, he's one of the progenitors of multicultural education, uses the term equity pedagogy. And when he talks about equity pedagogy, he talks about teachers attempting to draw on students' firsthand knowledge and experience, their culture, their language as a way in which to teach. That is not related to what Adrienne and I have been talking about, which is critical race theory. Which is again, it's grand theory that comes out of the law and that's been applied to education. No, I don't know that critical race theory could be taught in elementary schools. Can you teach children to critically interrogate issues of race and racism? Absolutely. And that is what multicultural education tries to do, is to get kids to think critically about race.

Mike: And so before we go on to–

Adrienne: And can I add though that what's getting promoted as critical race theory in the classroom is really just a presentation of the kind of multicultural history that we have. So what the white supremacists seem to be upset with is that we're talking about the multiple histories that make up the United States. People of color didn't just emerge in 2008 when Obama became president, right? People of color have been here. And by people of color, I mean, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinx folks, Native Americans, American Indians, have been here. They've been here. And now we're talking about what does it mean for those groups that have been here, and what are their histories with the development of the United States, and the development of the United States has been contested. It hasn't been this great westward expansion and a celebration of the pioneers and people who have been here. Those histories have been again, complicated, contested, and if anything, that's what it seems to be, the pushback that people are wrongly attributing to critical race theory. Ron Takaki was talking about multiple histories decades ago. And he was not a critical race theorist. He was a historian. So again, the complication of American history is not the purview of critical race theory, and I think that's what people are misunderstanding.

Marvin: Yeah. Anything that critiques inequality in America along any lines or perspective is now considered to be critical race theory.

Mike: Yeah. So, I guess on that point, let's talk about some of the terms that are used in critical race theory. We've already covered intersectionality. Dr. Lynn, you described racial realism, which is the idea that racism is a permanent feature of the United States not an aberration from it. How about interest conversions? That was a big term that came up in your book a lot.

Adrienne: Yeah. So that's a Derrick Bell term. And what he argued is that the interests of the elite when people who are disenfranchised, people of color who are disenfranchised, the poor, that our interests will never align with the interests of the elites. And so that interest convergence isn't a strategy. And so the Brown decision is an example of interest convergence, where there was a bigger interest by elites that in some ways seemed to align with the interests of people of color who wanted to eradicate de jure racial segregation. But the way that power works is that we won't see the kind of freedom and the relief that we hope for. And if we do, it'll be short term, and the Brown decision kind of encapsulates that. So interest convergence is an analytical frame.

Again, it's a way of understanding why when an anti-discrimination or, we could say, anti-racist policy is introduced, why it doesn't do what we hope it will do. Because the kind of liberal wisdom is that if we align our interests or converge our interests with each other (we see this now with the Democrats and the Republicans) then we can somehow come up with a compromise. And what Derrick Bell was saying is that the interests of the elites are always incompatible with the needs of the disempowered, of the oppressed. And so it's not a viable strategy. It shouldn't be something that we argue for, and we will always be in the cycle of oppression and disadvantage if we try to align our interests in a way.

Mike: Yeah. And just spell it out further, what were the interests that Bell specifically noted in the Brown vs. Board decision that the elite seemed to have?

Adrienne: So in 1954, remember we were under the Red Scare, right? We were in a war for empire, right, who was going to be the superpower, was it going to be the US or was it going to be Russia? And was it going to be democracy or was it going to be communism? It was hard to sell democracy when you have consigned a whole group of people–and not just black people, Latinx people, Asian people, Native Americans–to second class citizenship. We're disenfranchised as a group, substandard everything from housing to schooling to unemployment. And so it was hard to sell democracy around the world when most of the world was black and brown. And so it was in our foreign interests to have something that– Bell would say that Brown was kind of performatory, it was political theater. So it appeared to the world that we had addressed our racial segregation issue when in fact we hadn't. Because the second Brown decision with all deliberate speed acquiesced to Southern whites who were incalcitrant. They were very clear about what they weren't going to do as related to racial segregation, and the court acquiesced to that. So that's the interest. There was the interest of black and brown people, because Latinx folks were a part of the suite of cases that made up the Brown decision, who wanted equal education.

They didn't necessarily want to go to school with white people, but what they wanted was their fair share, what they put in by way of their taxes that they would get out. And in fact, what we found is that people of color were double taxed. They were not only paying their taxes, but they were paying more for less. So they were paying in what they were supposed to pay in terms of taxes, but they weren't getting it back, and it was being siphoned to support a dual system of education that advantaged whites. And so what black folks at least in the south won was their fair share. Give me what I put in. So I don't have to go to school with whites, when I put my money in, build schools for our kids. And that's what they sought.

And Derrick Bell lamented his role in that. He has a piece called “Serving Two Masters.” And he wrote about how he and Marshall and the whole legal team were so wedded to undoing Jim Crow, which is a lofty idea. But it was on the backs of real people who were suffering in the South and suffering under a racial regime that was very violent. And so they knew the dangers of being forced to be around white folks. And they were under no illusions that just because the Supreme Court got rid of de jure racism they were somehow going to be safe.

And we know that after the Brown decision, we entered an equally racially violent time for folks of color. And so they weren't agitating to be next to white folks, what they wanted was their fair share. And so he, Bell, talking about this serving two masters, was that he was on one hand trying to serve these lofty ideals and also thinking that he was serving the people and he wasn't. He was in fact ignoring the people and not serving them. And so his book Silent Covenants was his re-imagining of Brown. What would it have been like if he had actually listened to the people? That he was going to collect their testimony and add their names to the lawsuit so that the Brown decision could be the Brown decision. What if he had actually listened to them? And that the aim wasn't to eradicate racial segregation but to just beef up Plessy, to make it in fact separate and equal, what would we be like as a country if they had pursued that track?

Mike: Yeah. So jumping back to racial realism, and for my anti-fascist listeners, it's racial realism not race realism, which is just another way of talking about biological determinism among fascists. We're talking about racial realism which is a CRT term. Can we explain that in terms of the Brown vs. Board decision? Because that was really well explained in the book.

Marvin: Sure. I think it relates very well to what Adrienne was talking about in the sense that the structure of white supremacy is such that it doesn't really allow for anything that will work directly against it or break it down. And so these gains that Adrienne was talking about that communities of color can experience through policy and legislation and so on have to be sort of situated within the context of something that ultimately benefits whites. And that speaks to the sort of durability of the structure of white supremacy itself and the way in which it is maintained and its permanence. It makes allowances for shifts and changes, but as a structure, kind of always stays in place.

So that's ultimately I think how I view it. Some people would talk about revolution. Bell doesn't talk explicitly about revolution in the way that Marxists talk about that, and so I think to equate critical race theory with Marxism is a misnomer. However, I do think that implicit in this idea of racial realism is the notion that if we are ever going to overcome it, or if it's ever going to change, that we do have to really look at the sort of political, social, economic deep structures of our society and really think about how folks are arrayed within that, and reconsider a whole range of institutional formations, as well as other types of structures that are designed to serve, uplift, and uphold in advance white supremacy, unfortunately to the detriment of folks of color. So again, implicit within the notion is the need for some kind of fundamental change or shift in the way our society is structured if we were going to move beyond racism as a structure.

Adrienne: And I do want to say, Bell did have a critique of capitalism. Would he have called himself a neo-Marxist? I don't know, but he– CRT came, it was– CRT scholars initially conferenced with critical legal studies scholars because they were looking for a way of trying to again, understand how, in light of the anti-discrimination law, civil rights law, voting rights act, so on, we still had persistent inequality. And the critical legal studies was a neo-Marxist or Marxist group of scholars, and the class critique just wasn't enough. But Bell had a critique of capitalism, but I don't know that he necessarily would have called himself a Marxist per se, because they believe that there was a relationship between race and class, not just class only and not just race only.

CRT has always been kind of interdisciplinary. And to Marvin's point about racial realism, I will say that I've heard people say that critical race theory doesn't have hope or that it's full of despair. And my reading of Bell is that it, this is the racial realism piece, that this is the history that we have in the US. We have a history of racism that remakes itself at every opportunity of great agitation by people of color. So with the reconstruction being one, the civil rights movement being another, I would say there are– Barack Obama's election, although I don't think he was revolutionary, was a major kind of point in our history, and here we are again in a moment of retrenchment and extreme racial hostility on the parts of whites in response to one event, and that was the election of Barack Obama.

So again, so Bell would say, which is why he would argue for the permanence of racism, which I agree with, is that racism in the US is not going to go away. It'll show up in different forms. And so now it's showing up in restriction of voting rights, an attack on ideas, attack on teaching and learning. And so it remakes itself; it reforms itself, these formations that Marvin was talking about.

Marvin: Yeah, I think I would say too that while critical race theorists, as Adrienne points out, have a critique of maybe what I would call like rampant or rabid capitalism, we are not Marxist because Marxists primarily believe that society is structured mainly according to class and that race for example is sort of, racism is an outcome of class warfare. I don't think most critical race theorists believe that.

I think critical race theorists believe that racism is or white supremacy is what we would call the superstructure, so to speak if you want to speak in Marxist terms, and that everything else is connected to and related to that including class. Not to suggest that that capitalism isn't a powerful force and system in and of itself. It is. But that, I think we would argue that white supremacy is as powerful a force, which would be a big difference between critical race theorists and Marxists in terms of their thinking. And these forces reinforce each other, just like sexism and homophobia and Islamophobia, all of these -isms reinforce each other in different ways and support a system that is inherently unequal.

Mike: Okay. So I guess more on the terminology, how about we talk about whiteness as property, and I guess first define what whiteness means in critical race theory,

Marvin: People have described Cheryl Harris's work as being a critique of capitalism and may be in some ways because she is talking about the way in which white people shifted the notion of their relationship to property, that native people in this country had never viewed themselves as owners of the land, that the land is to be respected, the land is to be valued. They don't personally own it. So this idea of land ownership was a very sort of Western European idea. And unfortunately the way it was developed, the way it manifested itself, is that only a few people had ownership to land and had access to the power and the wealth that then came with land ownership. And those were essentially middle class white men.

What Cheryl Harris is pointing out is that white people's skin color, their whiteness in and of itself, gave them access to capital, to land, to power. And so their white skin is valuable and is a form of property that could be valued. And George Lipsitz and other people talk about the same kind of concept of whiteness as something that is inherently valued by white people.

1. E. B. Du Bois talks about whiteness or white skin as a psychological wage. He conducted research that sort of looked at the attitudes of white working class people and their racial attitudes in particular, and many would tell you that they would rather be a poor white person than to be a wealthy black person, because they understand inherently the value of white skin in a white supremacist racist society.

So that is what in my view Cheryl Harris is talking about, is the assigned value to whiteness as a form of real property that if you compare the wealth of black people to white people, for example, you see significant difference. Melvin Oliver and [Thomas] Shapiro talked about that, and they've documented historically the wealth gaps between even black wealthy people and white wealthy people, for example. And so that's what she's talking about. It's not about trying to undermine capitalism per se, although yes, they use an inherit critique of the way in which capitalism has unfortunately further marginalized folks of color in this country through the assignment of property.

Adrienne: Yeah. I would encourage people to read it because it's a really dope article, because one of the things that she talks about is that in the US property ownership was the way in which people were conferred the franchise. And your wealth was determined by how much property you owned, and that property were people literally and land, and that whiteness functions in that same way, that one can acquire wealth based on the value of their whiteness. And that there are rules with ownership of property. So you can trade it, I mean, you can give it to someone, you can withhold it. And so it was just really beautiful how she used the metaphor property ownership and the laws related to property ownership to talk about how whiteness functions as property in the US. So that was–

Mike: Okay. Last one I want to talk about is counter storytelling.

Adrienne: Yeah. So counter storytelling is speaking back to what we would say are kind of stock narratives or master narratives about a range of things. So just if we left it in education, kind of the stock narrative about–

Mike: The achievement gap?

Adrienne: –achievement, yes, is meritocracy. Or why education is so important in the US. Education is the great equalizer. And it's the great equalizer because everyone has the same opportunities. And if you work hard, you too will achieve academically, and then your life will change miraculously. You'll be wealthy, you'll be able to do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's the stock narrative about education, public education.

And what we endeavor to do as critical race theorists is to kind of turn that stock narrative on its head and to show, because with that stock narrative the reason why then we have fewer students of color graduating from high school, or we have disparities in high school graduation rates, we have disparities in discipline rates, we have disparities in college acceptance, is because there's a problem with students of color, as opposed to questioning that stock narrative and speaking back to it with the experiences of students of color, where we know that there are problems with testing, with students being disciplined more harshly, with schools not offering certain courses, or with restrictions to access for certain courses. So those are examples of possible counter stories, that it's countering the master narrative about the status quo.

Marvin: And you know, Michael, one of the things about racism and white supremacy is that it intentionally frames or I'd say misframes folks of color. Intentionally, it puts us in what Adrienne talked about, Ronald Takaki calls an iron cage. And so the view of us and our experience is limited. And you see that on television. Look at the very limited number of depictions of black people and how we're generally depicted. I don't think I've ever seen a black education dean depicted on TV, something I've done for the last 10 years. Because in most people's eyes, they don't exist.

And it's because the frame is narrow and limited, and it's from someone else's perspective. And so what Adrienne was talking about is that counter story gives us the chance to tell our own story from our own perspective, using our own voice. And it opens up all kinds of possibilities for us to explore that are heretofore unseen, unheard, invisible. And so the counter story is very important.

I do want to say that, I think about Richard Delgado's work as well as Derrick Bell's work. If you read Derrick Bell's early work, Faces At The Bottom Of The Well, for example, is all a counter story. It's a counter narrative, a conversation between two fictionalized characters about race in America. Now the characters are fictionalized, but the issues that they talk about, the laws that they put out, everything is factual that they're discussing. And they're citing chapter and verse from certain legal cases and debating back and forth about them.

It gives the writer an opportunity to use maybe a fictionalized character or composite characters, that are a combination of different real characters, to tell stories that are actually based in fact and based in reality. A lot of scholars of color you see in the handbook and in other publications are using the counter story as a way to tell stories about their experiences of trying to get tenure and promotion in higher education and what happens in those meeting rooms when white tenured faculty are considering our cases and how they talk about our work and how they frame it. And so it gives the author the freedom to be able to tell what sometimes are very personal stories in a way that creates, I guess, a little bit of distance because the characters are fictionalized, and it appears like it's a made up story, but in fact, it's very real. It's just that as a way to protect the identity of the actual individuals, there's a fictionalized element to at least who the characters are.

Mike: So in the book, critical race theory is described not only as a theory to be taught but also a praxis to be applied in education. Marvin, I believe you take credit for coining the phrase "critical race pedagogy". What does that mean and what does it look like?

Marvin: For me at the time, this was 1999, and I was finishing my doctorate program at UCLA. I had done some research with teachers of color in New York City where I did my masters. And what I realized is that their understandings about teaching as a profession, what it meant to teach black and brown kids, what it meant to teach in an urban school, and how one goes about teaching those kids in a way that values who they are, values their living histories and so on, that that story was beginning to be told in brilliant ways by people like Gloria Ladson-Billings and Jackie Irvine and many, many others. They were focused mainly on issues of culture. And I found teachers who were very, very interested in talking in very explicit ways about race and race in the classroom and trying to draw on some principles of critical race theory as a way to help kids understand who they are as racialized individuals, but how racism is functioning in every aspect of their lives.

I didn't find the literature to really support that kind of pedagogical work in the classroom and so I found a nice connection between what these teachers were trying to articulate and critical race theory, which is really about giving voice to folks of color, but also centralizing race and racism and how it operates in our very lives, but also taking a global perspective on that too and thinking about how it functions and how it situates us more broadly. That was really my effort, to try to think about and be explicit about how teachers talk about and deal with issues of race and racism that really move beyond but also incorporate issues of culture and language and so on.

Mike: Adrienne, do you have anything to add on critical race pedagogy, critical race theory as praxis.

Adrienne: Yeah. I would say critical race theory as praxis is I think what I endeavor to do as a scholar in my work is to move beyond an article, move beyond a conference paper, move beyond just sitting at my desk to operationalize it. That means connecting on the ground with folks who are organizing against educational racism through school closings or the proliferation of charter schools. That's the kind of critical race praxis pieces that kind of make the work live beyond the page and to be a part of the organizing and the movement-making that folks are engaged in.

Mike: Okay. Well, Dr. Lynn, Dr. Dixson, thank you so much for coming on The Nazi Lies Podcast and giving the people an education in education. Again, the book is the Handbook of Critical Race Theory in Education out from Routledge, a very good book. I strongly recommend it. And thanks again for coming on the pod.

Marvin: Thank you for having me.

Adrienne: Thank you so much. Yeah, this was great. Thank you.

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