041 The Erickson Report, Page 3: A Longer Look at Critical Race Theory

041 The Erickson Report, Page 3: A Longer Look at Critical Race Theory

We're going to take a slightly Longer Look at critical race theory. We're not going to plunge in as deeply as we usually do with A Longer Look but we can at least lay out some basics.

Critical race theory is that academic law-school discipline you've heard about so much after never having heard of it at all before the fanatical right tried to turn it into a social bludgeon. When you do hear about it, it's usually without - or with a very confusing, jargon-laded - explanation. So I'm going to try to give a little clarity.

To start, I'm going to take us back to September 22, to a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on restoring the Voting Rights Act. At that hearing, Sen. Ted Ooze tried to dismiss the impact of voter ID laws by demanding of a panel of witnesses if such laws are racist and after having the one in Texas cited as an example of precisely that, came back with: “When I go to vote, they ask me for my ID, I pull up my ID, I show it to him [sic]. I vote. Is that racist?”

The witness to who he addressed the question gave a proper and effective answer, but I refer to this now because it occurred to me at the time that my answer would have been yes. Not that the person is necessarily racist, but that the act is racist because it operates within a racist system.

Later, it occurred to me that this is actually serves as a very basic illustration of what critical race theory is about.

That Texas voter suppression law was created, and was found by a federal court to have been created, with racist intent. Although facially racially neutral - it doesn't mention race anywhere in the text - its designers used demographic data and historical voting trends to target for restrictions those methods of voting that were more likely to be used by non-whites than by whites along with requiring those types of ID that non-whites were less likely to have. In other words, it was designed to make it harder for non-whites than whites to vote.

So even though it appeared on its face to be racially neutral, the racism was baked into the law. So if you are operating under that system, if you are voting under that law, you have two choices: don't vote or participate in a racist system. You could be the most non-racist voter who ever lived but still the system in which you operate means you are acting in a racist manner. You cannot avoid it.

That is a very simple, even over-simplified, example but it serves to illustrate what critical race theory is about: how racism is built into the law and social structures of our society.

Another simple, even simplistic but useful example is redlining, the practice of denying various services to residents of minority communities based solely on where they live. The most notorious, but not the only, examples involved what interest rates someone paid on a mortgage or a loan or even if they could get credit at all depended not on their individual circumstances but on their address. There actually were examples of whether or not you got credit depended on which side of a street you lived on, because the red line the bank drew to determine the credit-worthiness of a neighborhood went down the middle of that street.

What happened is that the previous decades, the history, of racial discrimination in housing and employment had resulted in black Americans being mostly confined to poor neighborhoods, lending itself to the superficially-reasonable but convenient notion that living in those communities meant you were less credit-worthy. So the segregated housing patterns generated by racial bigotry became locked in and persisted - and still persist - even after redlining was at least supposedly outlawed. (I say "supposedly" because as recently as 2015 banks were paying out settlements as a result of their redlining practices.)

The point is that racial and racist patterns, structures, that were created by white supremacy do not simply disappear on their own and they do not cease to exist, they do not cease to operate, to influence, because we are unaware of their roots. They are baked into the unspoken and quite often unaware assumptions about the law, about the economy, about our society which we carry in our heads and under which we operate.

Those assumptions are what critical race theory examines to get at the roots of the white supremacy which drove them. Because if they are to change, they must be examined, dissected, and actively overcome.

This doesn't mean that critical race theory is unassailable as a discipline and indeed there are critiques of it. And I have to admit that personally, I think that reducing everything to race, as some of its proponents do, as if there were no other factors such as economic class involved, is too simplistic. But at the same time that does not mean it is not a valuable tool.

And it also means that anyone who tells you that critical race theory is about how all white people are racist or about teaching white kids to feel guilty about being white either doesn't know what the hell they are talking about or is lying through their teeth. There is no third option - and the fuss about it is on the one hand being promoted by people who are invested in maintaining their own power and position and want to avoid any discussion of race, period, because they know an honest discussion will call into question their own privileged positions, and on the other hand is being embraced by those who are being distracted by the latest shiny penny to misdirect them from considering what is really impacting their lives or who are reluctant to examine their own assumptions because they are fearful of what they will find.

And that is evil on the one hand and tragic on the other.