White Rage, Anti-CRT, and a Path Forward
The world witnessed the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020. Soon after, Black Lives Matter demonstrations calling for racial justice echoed around the globe. These events were followed by a sharp increase in racial awareness trainings. Books addressing race remained at the top of the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for more than a year. Employers, schools, municipalities, and communities responded by promising to advance racial justice. There was talk that we were entering a period of racial reckoning.
Early in 2021, however, less than a year after Mr. Floyd was killed, Republican lawmakers began to introduce legislation in hopes that any progress toward a racial reckoning would be short lived. In particular, they have done so by attacking critical race theory (CTR) — a long-standing theory within legal scholarship that examines the role race plays in past and present public policy, law, and criminal justice — as if it were some new form of un-American indoctrination. It's clear that those attacking critical race theory don’t understand the actual theory and can’t reference any of its main claims. But that hasn’t stopped a number of Republican-led state legislatures from utilizing the label to pass so called “anti-CRT” legislation that restricts public school teachers from addressing certain topics, including race and gender.
In truth, these legislative gag orders have nothing to do with the theory. Critical race theory is not part of the curriculum in K-12 education. It is rarely taught in a college classroom, except at better law schools. So what explains the explosive use and misuse of the label?
In the current political climate, CRT has been made a flashpoint serving as a bucket to hold a variety of conservative grievances. These include concerns about diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings and the teaching of U.S. history utilizing The 1619 Project, Trail of Tears, Juneteenth, and the burning of Black Wall Street, among any number of other moments that reveal the nation’s legacy of white supremacy and racial violence. DEI training and race-conscious curricula are designed to help us make sense of the racial inequities shaping the world in which people live and die today. They are designed to help us improve our laws, practices, and policies. But political conservatives see this push for racial justice as a threat to their power, so they are using the tactic of fear — making the specious claim that anti-racist initiatives create racial division and make white people feel guilty and, thus, must be banned.
Tennessee was one of the first to pass such a ban. Tennessee’s law, under the prohibited concepts provision, prohibits any instruction through which “[a]n individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex.” The effort under way to pass laws that prohibit the teaching of race, gender, and a variety of other topics in K-12 public and charter schools (as well as public universities in some states) has been significant. As of spring 2022, gag laws have passed in nine states. More than a dozen others have proposals in process.
How is it that we have moved from what seemed like a racial reckoning in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd to a silencing of educators on issues of race, gender, and LGBTQI identities?
White Rage
Historian, Carol Anderson in her book, White Rage, explains that structural racism has fostered anger and backlash from white people. Her research lays out historical junctures where Black people have gained social power — such as the Reconstruction era that followed the abolishment of slavery, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court rulingin support of integrated education, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act prohibiting racial discrimination in voting — only to have each met by significant backlash in the form of white rage. White rage is legislation, court decisions, and policies that have manifested as Jim Crow. It has driven a variety of strategies — including taxpayer vouchers designed to avoid integrating schools and increase the privatization of education. White rage was evident in Richard Nixon’s infamous Southern Strategy to win the White House. It underpinned the Reagan-Bush-and-Clinton-era War on Drugs that disenfranchised significant numbers of Black people. According to Anderson, every inch of Black advancement has been met by some variation on white rage.
The pattern of white rage identified by Anderson helps to contextualize the present moment. What is so threatening about DEI training and the teaching of The 1619 Project? Most of us understand that these trainings are positive. DEI trainings help to capture the racial experiences of whiteness while The 1619 Project and other efforts to teach of fuller and more honest version of American history helps us understand that the inequality we observe in society today is a reflection of the long history of systemic racial bias and exclusion against people of color. The DEI trainings and curricular changes are not a threat to children. Rather, they offer a better way forward for all. However, for the conservative politicians driving the backlash, promoting racial awareness and knowledge pose a threat to the status quo, which is to say the continuation of white supremacy as normal.
Path Forward – Commitment, Creativity & Interest Convergence
I am an educator. I am in this line of business because I am committed to the pursuit of truth. I am fortunate enough to live in a state, Illinois, in which it is unlikely that the anti-truth, gag order legislation proposed will become law. But even if it does, I have other avenues I can pursue. I can teach through my church, I can teach within community organizations, I can teach in my living room or yours.
At this current critical juncture, I try to garner inspiration from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when activists organized in every way possible to address racism and racial injustice. In fact, I think it is time for a new Freedom Summer — channeling the 1964 Freedom Summer in which key organizations and more than a thousand volunteers worked together to register Black voters and otherwise support the Black community in Mississippi. We can call ours Freedom to Learn Summer 2022 — one in which we collectively commit to countering the latest version of white rage. For those of us in education, this work includes defending the freedom of teachers to teach and children to learn truthful history and the freedom to be trained in DEI. Through every venue possible, we need to find ways to exercise and celebrate these freedoms.
Indeed, as we push forward for social justice, there is much to learn from the past. Virtually every major advancement in rights for Black people have come from the convergence of interests. For example, many court decisions, rather than reflecting an arc toward justice, reflect something far less virtuous. Dereck Bell in Silent Covenants reveals that motivation for the Brown v. Board of Education decision was not a moral shift on the part of the U.S. Supreme Court toward equality. Rather, the decision reflects national interests of the time. The U.S. was competing in the Cold War against the Soviet Union for the hearts and minds of Black and Brown populations around the globe. Desegregating schools was calculated to help in this effort.
As we plan actions to advance racial justice, the ways in which our honest history and racial competency benefits us all should never be far from sight. While many of us have worked to change hearts and minds, history teaches us that change with the potential for radical social justice only comes about when interests converge. History also teaches us that, to move our society forward, we must find a way to move through and past white rage.
Jacqueline Battalora, Ph.D., J.D., M.T.S., is the author of Birth of a White Nation: The Invention of White People and Its Relevance Today. A former Chicago police officer, she is now a lawyer and a professor of Sociology at Saint Xavier University, Chicago. Battalora is also working to organize a nationwide Freedom to Learn Summer 2022. More at jbattalora.com.