Critical Race Theory

 We had legal systemic racism for most of our history. That is a fact, Jack.

In Search of the Broad Highway: The Limits of Law and the Rise of Critical Race Theory by Dave Tell gives a history and explanation of CRT.

See, the law can only do so much to change how people think.

Constance Baker Motley, an attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) who would go on to become the first black woman appointed to the federal bench, first noticed the shift in strategy in Georgia.2 Two years before she filed suit on behalf of James Meredith, she represented Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter, both of whom had been denied admission to the University of Georgia because they were black. When the case went to trial, university president Omer Clyde Aderhold testified that the applicants were rejected because the university was crowded and the dorms were full.3 It was his only option. Aderhold worked for Governor Ernest Vandiver, who promised that not one black student would be admitted to segregated schools on his watch. But five years before Vandiver was elected, the US Supreme Court had found that state-sanctioned segregation of public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Trapped between Vandiver and Brown, Aderhold lied about the size of his dorms.

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Brown thus introduced an asymmetry into arguments over race and education. Motley and her clients were openly pursuing integration, but their opposition refused to engage. Straightforward argument was met with misdirection; appeals to justice were met by protestations of insufficient space. In the metaphor of John Minor Wisdom, the judge who wrote the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ finding in favor of the plaintiff, the open argument of the “broad highway” was met with the obstructionism of “sharp thickets.” The defendants didn’t deny the constitutional validity of Brown; they simply argued that institutions were ill prepared, that applications were incomplete, or that applicants themselves were unqualified. Ostensibly colorblind policies, such as those preventing crowded dorms, replaced race as the principle of selective admissions without altering the purpose of selective admissions—the preservation of an all-white university. While these policies originated in racial animus and tended toward racial segregation, the men who devised them denied their origins and dismissed any racial impacts as incidental. 

And that is what the Republicans are trying to scare you with: truth and reality. Are you really so terrified of either?

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