Presumptive Mediocrity and Co-opted CRT

Lauren Michele Jackson and Jelani Cobb use The New Yorker’s platform to explain and support critical race theory as jurisprudence applicable across disciplines and professional fields.?Jackson’s piece, “The Void that Critical Race Theory Was Created to Fill,” explains the legal, social, and political interstice that inspired scholars to formulate CRT, while Cobb centers CRT principal Derrick Bell to further explicate the origin and intent of CRT in “The Man Behind Critical Race Theory.” Together, the articles offer a historical overview of CRT that includes its major players, philosophical origins, and trajectory. Those conversations construct a nexus between concepts introduced by bell hooks, Charles Mills, Cheryl Harris, and Lani Guinier, the nexus of legal theory, philosophy, collective action, and democracy grounded by race.

Two contestation points in Jackson and Cobb’s articles stood out. One point involves presumptions of Black intellectual mediocrity by White scholars or academics entrenched in whiteness, evinced in Harvard University student advocacy for faculty of color— specifically to secure a replacement for Derrick Bell— a Black professor — to teach Constitutional Law and Minority Issues. The second point involves the matter of HB 3979, Texas legislation implemented as part of a national campaign to prevent teachers from discussing widely debated, controversial public policy or social issues. The campaign, a political move intended to diminish educators’ capacity to teach topics such as historical colonization, U.S. genocidal formation, race-based social systems, civic engagement, and activism, demonizes CRT as a conservative dog whistle culpable in the nation’s political divide. Political maneuvers like HB 3979 ultimately suppress students’ civic voices which, in turn, denigrates and endangers the future of democracy.

In the first section of “The Void that Critical Race Theory Was Created to Fill,” Jackson describes student advocacy to recruit a Black professor to teach a course about issues involving race and the law after Derrick Bell, the course’s original professor, quit in protest of Harvard’s racial and gender discriminatory hiring practices. Jackson explains that in 1980, “[Dean] Vorenberg asked the students what was ‘so special about Constitutional Law and Minority Issues. In terms of hiring, would they not prefer an ‘excellent white professor’ over a ‘mediocre Black one’?” Vorenberg suggested that a White professor would be better suited to fill the racial void, the “void in legal training” as Jackson opines, than a Black professor. The presumption is that even though equally qualified individuals attain professorial status, White is superior to Black. Why is that? What is not being said? A host of implications regarding the U.S. educational system enter my mind, implications informed by race. Furthermore, the notion of “excellence” conjures moral character. The idea that a Black professor is less excellent than a White professor relies on suppositions about quality, ambition, resolve, worth, and merit. Vorenberg’s racist comment to students not only attacked Black intelligence but also our moral character, more than enough cause for h his immediate termination by today’s standard. Yet, he continued to “serve” students as dean until 1989.

?Moving on to my second, both Jackson and Cobb featured heroes and villains as evidence to support their arguments. One antagonist quoted in both arguments stood out: Christopher F. Rufo, the dupe who credits himself for instigating a partisan war against critical race theory in numerous U.S states. Bills like HB 3979, recently signed into law by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, hope to “regulate civic education in public schools.” One stipulation is that “that teachers should not be ‘compelled’ to discuss current events or ‘currently controversial issues’ and, most sensationally, that students (i.e., white students) should be spared any sense of “blame,” “guilt,” or other “psychological distress” on account of belonging to a dominating race or sex.

?Conservative politicians who support legislation like HB 3979 clearly discern winners and losers, rights and wrongs, social and political dichotomies occurring within U.S. and world history. A phrase from the legislation’s text cautions: “teachers who choose to discuss current events or widely debated and currently ontroversial issues of public policy or social affairs shall, to the best of their ability, strive to explore such issues from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective” (HB 3979). The notion that there is “one perspective” to controversial issues, public policy, or social affairs infers a historical educative paradigm of one-sided teaching. The history of teaching from a singular colonialist perspective concedes a monolithic paradigm grounded by a redoubtable white nationalist bend. On its face, exploring explore controversial “issues from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective” opens the door for more robust, diverse discussions about history and race. However, such bills are designed to squelch revisionist histories and frank dialogue about race, gender, and sexuality, which is why conservatives choose to scapegoat CRT.

?Speaking of scapegoats, in “The Void that Critical Race Theory Was Created to Fill,” Jackson offers an account to explain how CRT became a political buzzword. Journalist Christopher Rufo needed an angle. An interview with Wallace-Wells found Rufo boasting about his campaign role:?

he’d gone truffle-hunting for incendiary ideas in the works of scholars such as Bell, Crenshaw, and Angela Davis, whose names he had found in the footnotes of anti-racism best-sellers. In terms of its ability to foster racial hysteria, critical race theory struck Rufo as more promising than reigning buzzwords such as “woke” or “cancel culture.” It was “the perfect villain,” he told Wallace-Wells. (Jackson, 2021, THVCRT)

?Scouring scholarly literature like first-year undergrad Rufo found the oft-cited CRT had a nice ring to it as the idiom most likely to galvanize a conservative, racist audience.?Additionally, in “The Man Behind Critical Race Theory,” Cobb also implicates Rufo as the culprit who used CRT as an absurdist touchstone that evoked “generalized fears” about “liberal race talk.” Rufo posted on Twitter:

?We have successfully frozen their brand— ‘critical race theory’— into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. (Cobb, MBCRT, 2021)

?Interestingly, the current liberal “brand” relies on the catchphrase “diversity, inclusion, and equity,” while Patricia Williams, a key CRT scholar, accuses conservatives of “definitional theft” (Cobb, MBCRT, 2021) in the way CRT has been co-opted to serve a racist political agenda. This glamming onto CRT by right-wing politicians constitutes a power grab, an attempt to maintain power through manifesting social chaos. A fifth-grader can understand notions of racial diversity, cultural inclusion, and social equity, while CRT is an erudite theory introduced to students well beyond high school.

?There is no soundness in bills such as HB 3979 (Texas). They read nonsensically to the perspicacious mind. HB 3979 presents a slippery slope that opens the legal system to a flood of prohibitions, including segregated employment among teachers when students inevitably complain that their teacher of color makes them feel uncomfortable, anxious, or psychologically distressed. Moreover, what type of lesson might make students feel uncomfortable for being responsible for historical wrongs based on their race, gender, or national origin? such as Florida’s S.B. 148, which passed in its senate last week. What lesson is free from history, let alone “historical wrongs”? Every subject is imbued with history—reading, writing, mathematics, science, music, the arts. What outcome can we expect when a student complains that creationism makes them just as uncomfortable as Darwin's evolutionary theory? No lessons for you this week. It seems logical to presume that the first step in preventing uncomfortable subjects from being taught in classrooms is to remove teachers of color, queer, transgender, Russian, or Ukrainian from white institutions.

?I say educators of color who work at predominantly white institutions are in jeopardy due to white fragility. The typical student of color, queer, transgender, and international student routinely experience or has endured some form of psychological distress due to their socially maligned, stigmatized, or outsider identity. Uncertainty and discomfort become historically overlooked, underserved students’ intimate companions. Learning to cope with anxiety and uncomfortable circumstances are integral components in their psychological development, resilience, and mental flexibility. White fragility seems an apt descriptor for the entitled, the privileged, a protected life middle-class and upper-middle-class White students enjoy within the halls of education, much like life within the walls that surround their gated residences.

?Furthermore, students who learn diverse histories elevate their intellectual acumen and enrich their cultural competence. They also become well-rounded, empathetic individuals equipped to humanize people, especially historically overlooked, underserved people. Taken together, learning entails a process that stretches, flexes, and exercises cognitive muscles to build a strong, neuroplastic mind, a process that evokes various emotions. Whether discomfort, anxiety, blame, or even guilt, feelings and emotions are part of the learning process. Students learn to cope with discomfort, fear, and uncertainty and gain the sense of self-efficacy associated with accomplishment.

These inimical bills impact teachers and students, which ultimately diminishes our collective opportunity to grow, to evolve. For instance, students might find my very classroom presence as a fifth-generation American — a Congolese, Irish, and Native American woman — angst-provoking. Any lessons that I teach emanate from my person, my Black body and mind, the history-laden human vessel that is me. My presence comprises lessons in history, genealogy, gender, sexuality, and disability—identities that serve as social and cultural bridges that lend to empathy and mutual understanding— cultural competence— within and without the classroom. My presence, as embodied discourse, can evoke discomfort among White students. Education predicated on feeling pleasant offers nothing to learn except hedonism, Christopher Rufo’s legacy.

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Cobb, Jelani. “The Man Behind Critical Race Theory.” The New Yorker (September 13, 2021). https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/20/the-man-behind-critical-race-theory

?HB No. 3979. Toth. Texas. Retrieved March 20, 2022. https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/87R/billtext/pdf/HB03979I.pdf

?Jackson, Lauren Michele. “The Void that Critical Race Theory Was Created to Fill.” The New

Yorker (July 27, 2021). https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-void-that-critical-race-theory-was-created-to-fill

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