Boogeymen only exist in the imaginations that create them and in the fears on which they prey. Spanning centuries and cultures, the boogeyman is conjured to frighten people, especially children, into fearing whatever it is the conjurer wants them to fear.
The boogeyman is the villain of a million faces, able to morph into whatever identity its creator chooses. The boogeyman is “there to ensure that we follow the rules,” says an article in the October 2016 edition of Scientific American magazine, and it is “shapeless so it can be anywhere at any time, whether that means lurking under the bed or in the closet or behind a tree in the forest.”
Or in the pages of books.
The boogeyman of the moment is critical race theory, or CRT, which, according to its Republican critics, is spreading like kudzu across the nation’s school districts as it teaches that all white people are racist and forces white children to hate themselves because they are white.
None of this is true.
CRT is a legal analysis, more than four decades old, which teaches that race is a social construct. That racism is structural in institutions and laws. It’s deeper than individual biases. Instead, the blame is on the racist systems devised decades ago that still suppress people of color today.
Redlining, for instance. Because banks, by law, could deny Black people mortgages, the nation’s Depression-era and postwar housing policy was designed, by law, to deny them the same opportunities given to white people to build wealth through home equity. The same goes for separate but unequal education, which was legal until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
CRT is taught in universities, not in any school district in the nation, meaning that not only does CRT not teach what its critics claim, it’s also not taught where they insist it is. Yet this year, Texas is among the states to pass laws banning the teaching of something that has never been taught in its schools.
The transformation of CRT into something that it’s not, into a boogeyman to be feared and lathered with vitriol, was the intent of a young conservative activist named Christopher Rufo. A few months ago, after striking a match to the anti-CRT tinderbox, the political arsonist took to Twitter to admire his handiwork. “We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’— into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions,” wrote Rufo. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’”
Rufo succeeded. No phrase is more widely used by people with less understanding of what it is than “critical race theory.” Its most passionate critics, be they politicians, activists or parents, invoke it without explaining what it is or reciting what specific books and writers they want excluded.
Equally telling is that in their cataloging of the sins of CRT, they never mention law professors Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw or any of CRT’s intellectual architects. Critics don’t know these names because they haven’t read their or anyone else’s work on CRT.
Critical race theory is used as an all-purpose avoidance of American history, perspectives and experiences that make people, specifically white people, uncomfortable. CRT reveals the American history, perspectives and experiences historically hidden from those who aren’t victims.
It’s not the “critical” or “theory” that causes the most discomfort.
It’s “race.”
Yes, the same boogeyman America can’t move past. Any facts, books or ideas questioning previously unchallenged worldviews and leading to a deeper, more inclusive exploration of our history — including the impact of slavery and racism — is labeled “critical race theory.”
By turning it into a boogeyman lurking in places it’s never been, its conjurers are exploiting ignorance and ancient fears — the real threat to our democracy.
San Antonio Express-News
