Jon Wiener: We’re a little late talking about Critical Race Theory (CRT). In the past three and a half months, the Fox News Channel has talked about it nearly 1,300 times. It’s being banned from public schools and colleges in something like 13 Republican states. But what is critical race theory? And why is this happening now? The first thing you ever published on the topic was in the Harvard Law Review a long time ago—in 1988.
Kimberlé Crenshaw: “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment.” The basic point of that article was that wherever there is race reform, there’s inevitably retrenchment, and sometimes the retrenchment can be more powerful than the reform itself. And some of what we are experiencing right now is exactly that.
JW: It’s rare that a professor’s scholarly work gets banned in more than a dozen states. I guess that’s a measure of the power and significance of your writing. But I’m not sure I should say congratulations.
KC: I’m not sure if I would receive it, either! Of course the whole point of writing about ideas is for them to spread, but it’s an entirely different thing when the idea that you are writing about has been gentrified effectively by an incendiary opposition.
JW: The warriors against CRT think the idea is that, “By your race alone, you will be judged.” They don’t seem to know about intersectionality.
KC: Not only do they not know about it, they don’t want to know about it. They don’t care about what the ideas are. They can take the name, fill it with meaning, and create this hysteria, and that can be a winning issue when they really don’t have any other agendas to push. Obviously they don’t get that one of the main points of critical race theory is that to understand racism in our history only as a matter of prejudice or bias—as a matter of individuals who are morally bankrupt—is not to understand the history of race in America. The whole point of critical race theory was to repudiate the idea that we can talk about racism only as a quality of individuals rather than as a structured reality that’s embedded in institutions.