CRT -Let's Clear This Up by Cheryl Gibbs Binkley
Back in June, Elizabeth Schultz, a former FCPS School Board member who lost her last bid for election, published an OpEd in the Fairfax Times promoting quite a few oft-repeated, rabid-right talking points about Critical Race Theory and ominously said CRT is being taught in Fairfax County Public Schools. She is not alone in glomming onto a quick soundbite as a way to attack the other political party and liberals. Lots of politicos all across the country who are trying to hold onto or return to power are doing it.
I did not see the article until the other day, but her points are so distorted that I can’t let her piece or this question go unanswered, even if it’s a couple of months later.
The points she put forward were:
Our local schools do teach Critical Race Theory to students.
It is a Marxist theory that promotes race as the most important thing about an individual.
That CRT is the same thing as equity, justice, diversity, and culturally responsive learning.
That FCPS incorporated CRT into its curriculum through a curriculum rewrite in 2018 by Colleen Eddy and Fairfax County supervisors adopted it through its OneFairfax program.
All of these points are, well- not really true- at least the way Schultz and her friends distort and misrepresent them.
Critical race theory is a very specific collegiate and legal form of analysis. It is part of a collection of graduate level Critical Analyses studies that can range from Economic (sometimes Marxist, sometimes Capitalist), to Feminist, to Racial, or other perspectives in their focus. The most notable thing about Critical Analyses is that each type looks at an unsolved problem from a perspective that has been traditionally overlooked and looks at aspects of a situation that have been left out of the problem-solving cycle.
Critical Analysis can influence how teachers and policy makers choose what they teach and how they teach it, or determine what policies are most fair, but it is not a good choice for direct K-12 instruction because it requires understanding words like structural determinism, epistemology, and deconstructionism- among a lot of other philosophical and critical analysis terms.
It is true that Gloria Ladson-Billings, the president of the National Academy of Education, and author of The Dream Keepers recommends teachers learn Critical Race Analysis to better their understanding of pedagogical choices, but nobody is proposing to teach 7 year olds post-modernism and deconstruction.
Once teachers or decision makers apply the analysis, they are able to see how laws, regulations, and societal norms have affected people of a particular category. Insights from looking at policies through the lens of race can be fairly obvious.
For instance, anti-slavery can be thought of as the original application of critical race analysis, even though the term CRT would not be created until 1989 at a workshop led by Kimberle’ Crenshaw. In the 19th century, anti-slavery people looked at how slavery was affecting black people on the ground in real terms and determined it was a harmful legal institution to them- Yes, it’s just that simple.
Today, we apply CRA when we ask ourselves how our zoning ordinances or subsidized housing rules affect communities predominantly of color. Or how our school boundaries and funding formulas affect families of color or poverty. We also apply Critical Feminist Analysis when we ask how does this policy or practice affect young mothers or elderly women. Thinking and analysis is not something to be afraid of, but a problem solving tool to be used among others.
Though CRT/CRA does examine how views on race have been embedded and highly influences our cultural practices, it does not propose that a person’s race is the most important or only thing in forming anyone’s character, intellect, personality, or actions. Institutional racism may hamper a person’s chances of getting healthcare, an education, finding higher paying jobs, and acquiring property and financial security, but certainly other family and personal conditions are important in creating the intersections of values, traits, and opportunities that combine to make up our lives. It does look at how individual racism becomes more pervasive, invisible, and powerful when embedded into societal rules.
For instance, if a businessman/plantation owner believes s/he is dependent on free labor to stay wealthy, s/he might move heaven and earth to protect that ability to have free slave labor, and when those slaves are deprived of pay for their labor, their daily lives suffer from the limits that imposes.
Society wide that structure affects the whole race of people who are enslaved, and affects their descendants, who also do not have access to that money they could have earned without the structural racism of slavery. Eventually that view, embedded in government policy, led to a bloody and divisive war that had massive destructive effects for the plantation owner as well.
Similarly, critical race analysis might reveal that today’s tax codes, pay scales, and access to property skew the economic potential of most people of color and continues to affect the opportunities of black and brown families. CRA also asks if there is a way to ameliorate the negative consequences of structural bias and racism.
So, No. Racism as the most important thing in an individual’s life is not what CRT/CRA is about, but it is apt to reveal how insidiously destructive policies built on bias are.
According to Ms. Schultz, efforts to address cultural and racial diversity and to create a school system equitable to all began in 2018 with a rewrite of the social studies curriculum. (Right before she lost her seat on the board in 2019).
I don’t mean to demean Colleen Eddy’s work, but in reality, Fairfax County schools had been grappling with meeting the needs of an increasingly diverse student population for about 20 years before that, and the 2018 rewrite Ms. Eddy oversaw was a reflection of what had already been happening in the classrooms across the county.
I know this because in 1998 when I was a FCPS parent of elementary students and began teaching, individual schools were already adapting toward a world view, rather than a one-ethnicity view. Elementary concerts were featuring songs from a variety of cultures around the world, and picture books were being incorporated with heros of varied ethnicities.
As early as the late 1990’s schools in the county were adopting programs like International Baccalaureate which incorporated a more global cadre of creators into the curriculum in lieu of only western-centric authors, art, and ideas. Those programs also seeped into the general curriculum of our schools, so that all students were getting a wider education.
Deliberate choices to expand the curriculum toward a more diverse and inclusive canon were not initiated to address the concerns of poor or black or brown families, but to address the concerns of those economically stable and well educated families who knew their children needed a wider education to become well-functioning adults in the broader society of the 21st century that would include many nationalities. They were driven by parent involvement.
In truth, though, those expanded horizons resonated with the colors and cultures of the students we were seeing in our classrooms, and enabled students to be excited about a curriculum that reflected them and their heritages. White students were not left out, but all students got a more universal view of what it means to be human in this world.
Because the county’s population continued to diversify, and because those program changes were so successful at building a highly regarded system, by 2018 those changes were becoming codified in the central office to reflect what was already happening across the county.
Similarly, the Board of Supervisors had a growing awareness that the county was developing pockets of economic disparity which threatened the unity and common prosperity for the county. They knew they were looking at a growing level of diversity, and an economic disparity in which the average family income on one side of the county was about half what it was in other parts of the county. Without a problem solving model taking that into account, Fairfax ran the risk of becoming a bifurcated rich-poor economy with haves and have nots that would change the reputation which had built a highly attractive community. One Fairfax was a reflection of that awareness.
So, much as Ms. Schultz and many of her friends would like to frighten us all about the threat of Critical Race Theory, there is nothing to fear from a step on the problem-solving wheel that asks, “Have we taken the needs of all our residents/students into consideration?”
Do we really want to be two, or three, or five Fairfaxes? Or two, or three, or five nations?