by Christian Z. Goering, Ph.D., NBCT
Anyone with a pulse probably heard the bastardization of the term Critical Race Theory over the past year. In the midst of a fall 2020 semester in which I was discussing how to become anti-racist educators with a group of future English teachers, based in part on April Baker-Bell’s new book, Linguistic Justice, Vershawn Ashanti Young’s work on code meshing, and on previous posts at this site by Sarigianides and Borsheim-Black and Falter, Alston, and Lee, my use of CRT was questioned. In fact, I remember exactly where I was when I received the email asking which of my courses utilized either CRT or the 1619 Project, a question posed to all instructors in my department/college. State legislators in Arkansas—and almost all elsewhere—suddenly became interested in those terms/ideas.
I responded that I used CRT primarily in the English Language Arts Methods course and in teaching an introduction to qualitative research course. I maintain that in both of those instances, I do not have the option or choice to include discussions of CRT because it is innate and provides an invaluable perspective for viewing data, analyzing literature, or preparing future teachers, for example. Teaching future teachers or researchers without considering these valid perspectives would be akin to teaching biology without discussing the cell.
From the fall of 2020 and the inquisitions about CRT then (nothing came of those requests, by the way, at least not yet), the warning siren intensified to a level that makes my ear drums feel splatty and staticky when I hear those initials. I decided that when I was asked those questions I’d offer a doctoral course on critical theories in education in the summer of 2021 and immediately emailed the parameters of the course—to include CRT and the 1619 Project—to our scheduling guru. I next created a folder in my email and on my social media accounts to start collecting any variety of CRT videos, memes, articles, et cetera for use in the class.
But a tenured white male professor teaching courses that reference and include CRT is hardly newsworthy, especially in a context in which bills to denounce CRT at all levels are rocketing through state legislatures around the country. As of today, eight states (Arizona, Idaho, Iowa, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas) have banned CRT in one form or fashion and many others are poised to follow suit. For a truly horrific look at the damage currently occurring, follow Christopher Rufo who is advancing the cause of and keeping careful tabs on banning CRT.
When given the generous opportunity to write for this admired space, I reluctantly decided I’d use any credibility or privilege I have to support ELA teachers facing this milieu. Systemic racism is real. Don’t believe me? Watch 13th. Read Nickel Boys or Stamped or one of the English only policies prevalent in states. Dear white people: Get out of your own space for half a second and look at the experience of literally anyone else in this country. Teaching English requires us to seriously consider the experience of others and the practice of ‘othering.’ CRT is one of many tools we can and should use to do precisely that. Let me explain.
How Did We Get Here (briefly)?
The abbreviated version of this, as I see it, is the insidious nature of the Trump administration policies—waking up each day to something worse than the day before, especially in terms of race and racism in America—led to the reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd. This—coupled with abhorrent wealth inequality in America, ongoing effects of systemic racism killing disproportionately more non-white members of our society during the early pandemic stirred people across the political aisles to see—if only temporarily—race and racism in America for what it was and is—a national crisis with roots in the systems of our country.
Perhaps sensing this shift in the hearts and minds of people on issues of race, then-President Trump announced the 1776 Project in part as a response to the 1619 Project. Government agencies were disallowed from discussing “divisive” topics such as systemic racism, diversity, equity, inclusion, implicit-bias training, or anti-racism (none of which are inherently divisive; all of which can cause discomfort). When President Biden took office, the 1776 Project was immediately removed and erased from the government website which caused conservatives to effectively move the fight to the states. Following the tracker I mentioned earlier, one could conclude that President Trump and his followers are winning this fight.
Let me abundantly clear: I’m a fan of English teachers and of teaching English. I’m in my 22nd year in the professions of either teaching it or preparing others to do so. But I also admit that our discipline is mired in systemic racism in all that it touches and one can look to a myriad of facts in order to reach the same conclusion. The books we teach are primarily of a white western canon. The way we teach language and writing is that the white middle to upper class way of writing and speaking is the only way acceptable. These approaches to teaching ELA are changing but are they changing fast enough? Is there enough urgency around these notions, following Muhammad? Tiffany Nyachae reminds us of what this moment means, “How we literacy and what we literacy must be of use in the actual lives of students from marginalized and historically oppressed groups.”
Are We Talking about Critical Race Theory or “Critical Race Theory”?
The scare quotes are apropos here because I’ll contend, as many others have, the whole point of the feigned outrage about “CRT” is a political effort to use fear to wrest back control of power from people who currently have some of it. It’s an effort to shift the narrative away from the racial atrocities that are far too commonplace in our country and to give conservatives a talking point that makes sense to most people—divisiveness and indoctrination are bad. I couldn’t agree more but an ironic part of all of this is that by limiting what I or our teachers can do in terms of CRT, these actors are participating in a form of indoctrination. It’s the old trick of passing gas while blaming someone else for it—1, 2, 3, not it. No I didn’t—yes you did!
According to CRT co-founder Kimberlé Crenshaw in an American Bar Association post, it is actually defined as, “critiqu[ing] how the social construction of race and institutionalized racism perpetuate a racial aste system that relegates people of color to the bottom tiers […, and] recognizes that racism is not a bygone relic of the past [but] acknowledges that the legacy of slavery, segregation, and the imposition of second-class citizenship on Black Americans and other people of color continue to permeate the social fabric of this nation” (George, 2021).
Let’s be clear—most people talking about CRT are not comfortable defining it. A local school board election in May witnessed a candidate attempt to stoke the fires of fear by suggesting the local school district employed “illicit bias” as part of their equity work; I’d guess most people cannot define—or better yet, are unwilling to accurately define—what CRT is or isn’t.
But isn’t this—using a term incorrectly to spark outrage—really a further enactment of a post-truth discourse in America and American politics? Paul Thomas and I could not guess for a second our dire warning about the dangers of post-truth America and fake news in our 2018 book could rear their ugly heads so quickly. We pondered then, “is critical media literacy a potentially lifesaving tool? We hope that sentiment is an overstatement.” The COVID-19 pandemic provided just such an opportunity to test out this notion, a chance for fake news to turn deadly on a massive scale.
A terrific new book on the topic by Rubin and Wilson, A Time of Covidiocy, alerted me for the first time to this quote from O’Toole:
Nearly every day for months, we watched Donald Trump walk into the White House press room and stand there and tell lies about the COVID pandemic and refuse to address it in a rational, scientific, medically appropriate manner. What we were watching was Donald Trump killing Americans just as surely as if he had his knee on their necks, closing off their airways, snuffing out their lives. It’s one thing to put up with his racism and misogyny and ignorance and contempt for the rule of law, but it’s quite another to watch him commit murder day after day, week after week, standing there contemptuously treating the pandemic as if were a conspiracy against him personally instead of a deadly disease that would infect millions and kill.
2020 as cited in A Time of Covidiocy
Our sentiment was not an overstatement.
Up is down, right is left, there’s a turkey with fur, and not much of anything makes much sense. That’s the point. And it is through this post-truth context—a blurring and mashing up of reality to fit the narrative, whatever that narrative might be—that we must try to make sense of it all in English classrooms. So, when an English teacher shared a message from a school official recently that claimed that their district did “not endorse a curriculum based on CRT” and if a teacher had questions about material in these terms, “don’t use it,” I was not surprised but very disappointed. I was also quick in responding to my friend that the school official in question was wrong.
This same school district teaches the fantastic work Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, a fact I’m quick to champion. I can promise the school official or anyone else paying attention that the act of teaching that book is a ringing endorsement of CRT and it is a fact that should be celebrated across this district and held out as an example for others. Will the district support it moving forward? Or, will teachers just elect to not take that risk following the advice from one of their leaders?
And that last question, prompted by the school official’s closing words, is why I suggest conservatives are winning with this “ban CRT” strategy and it is at the peril of teaching English (and other subjects). There are eight states where teaching a book like Just Mercy might net a teacher’s district a fine (1 to 5 million in Tennessee) or an immediate dismissal for the teacher. More states will pass similar legislation in the coming weeks and months. While restricting what a teacher can or can’t teach feels icky to me—a de jure limiting of what a teacher can do, it is actually the proxy or de facto impact that these laws create that will do the far more lasting damage. Teachers who don’t want to teach about race now have the perfect out—it might be against a policy of some sort or, GOD FORBID, make someone uncomfortable for having to examine their own privileges and racism.
There are a few things said about this past year’s focus on “CRT” that bear repeating here so that I’m abundantly clear: 1) Denying teachers the ability to teach about race is fundamentally racist; 2) Taking a concept like critical race theory and subverting it by redefining it is an act that can only be interpreted as reinforcing white supremacy; 3) Denying CRT is a racist act of white supremacy and a prime example of indoctrination; 4) Not endorsing CRT in a school district is against the standards that the discipline of ELA sets forth and is against the best interest of any such school district.
How Do We Get Past This?
The majority of Americans want issues of race in the curriculum handled appropriately and with accurate portrayals of what has or not happened in our history. I’m familiar with stories of how teachers attempting to do this well actually make things for themselves and their students much worse; mishandling an issue based in race in our classrooms insensitively or in a racist manner leads teachers to a range of discomfort from alienating students to being fired. Purposefully causing discomfort or emotional harm to students through curricular violence should result in corrective measures.
One thing we can do is get honest about it all and start to truly examine the Archaeology of Self, following Seally-Ruiz. I am a racist and I have biases and perspectives that were baked into me because I’m an American and grew up here. This doesn’t make me a bad person or doesn’t mean I hate America to admit that (I love America); my heart and actions are working towards anti-racism but that is work that is never completed, an ongoing unlearning of everything around me.
I’m currently reading Gloria Ladson Billing’s new book, Critical Race Theory in Education and recently read (much overdue) Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (highly recommend). Last year my students and I participated in a project that followed a blog post in 2019 by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), Being an Anti-Racist Educator is a Verb. In the aptly named ‘anti-racism is a verb project,’ we committed to read, consume, discuss, and share a variety of resources to gain knowledge about the world around us. All of us—instructor included—spent two hours per week outside of class over the semester developing additional knowledge with anti-racist goals. We shared with one another what we learned in class and what we didn’t know. Vulnerability was not optional. Future teachers are and should be prepared with this as a core part of their content knowledge.
And that’s the thing all of us must do—learn like there is no tomorrow. The racial literacy of teachers in America is an important aspect of how we move forward in schools. Let’s think with colleagues like Seally-Ruiz and Detra Price Dennis and their work around racial literacies in teacher education.
We should turn to our professional organizations like the NCTE for support. These posters are particularly unflinching and could be hanging in more classrooms and school spaces. As they say, racism exists and denying that in our country or classrooms, denying that centuries of racial oppression haven’t inscribed lasting effects on our society will not help us move forward. Just last week, the NCTE journal Language Arts dropped an entire issue dedicated to antiracist pedagogies. There are newly approved—yet to be officially released—standards for 7-12 ELA teacher preparation that include the language of anti-racism/bias.
Our discipline, in fact, endorses and requires a curriculum based on Critical Race Theory, from broad ideas like developing teacher knowledge and standards to an approach any of us could use to teach a piece of literature tomorrow:
Just as a feminist lens directs focus on representations of gender in litera- ture, a CRT lens directs focus on representations of race in literature. If fem- inism asks the overarching question, How does this text represent gender? a CRT lens asks, How does this text represent race? With this question central to literary interpretation, seeing, naming, and analyzing the role of race in literature become unavoidable.
Borsheim-Black and Sarigianides, 2019, p. 74
Following a pearl of wisdom I picked up in my playing or coaching football days, I see this situation in a similar light: Each day we have a choice to make: we can either get better or get worse; there’s no staying the same. Likewise (following Kendi, 2019), each day we have a choice to make: we can be anti-racist or racist; there’s no such thing as ‘not racist.’
About the Author
Christian Z. Goering began his career in higher education at the University of Arkansas in 2007 upon receiving a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from Kansas State University. Prior, he taught high school English and leadership courses at Washburn Rural High School in Topeka, Kansas. He writes about how English teachers use music in their teaching and education policy. He is the past Chair of the English Language Arts Teacher Educators, Director of the Northwest Arkansas Writing Project, faculty director of the Center for Children & Youth, and holds a faculty affiliation with the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Public Policy. In 2016, Goering was elected as a Fellow of the University of Arkansas Teaching Academy and also successfully renewed his NBCT license in English Language Arts. In 2019, Goering’s co-edited book received the Divergent Award for Excellence in 21st Century Literacies Research and his collaborative work with the Center for Children and Youth was acknowledged with the Governor’s Arts Award for Arts in Education.