Bothering to Look: The Debate on Critical Race Theory

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Bothering to Look: The Debate on Critical Race Theory

By Joel Levin

Almost 50 years ago, when I was in 7th grade in junior high school – before we knew better and decided to universalize middle schools in an attempt to segregate those who had experienced puberty on the one end, but had not turned into full-fledged bullies, prima donnas, anxiety disabled, or egomaniacs on the other – I had my first encounter with local government in action. My school district had decided to institute “New Math”. New math was a response in the late 1950s and early 1960s to the supposed math gap revealed by higher European math scores and the launching of the Russian Sputnik satellite. I was one of the students of this new math. That is how I came to be invited, or perhaps exhibited, as one of the subjects of this experiment, at a local school board meeting in my small western Pennsylvania city. That meeting turned out, in fact, to be little more than an open session for parental grievances about the outrageous new curriculum being foisted upon their unwary, unsuspecting, fragile, blank slate, and vulnerable children. I suspect that none of the actual children, that is, my classmates, thought of ourselves as any of these, nor likely did the teachers, who daily experienced the skepticism, doubt and even mild hostility to their teaching by any number of students. Nevertheless, that attitude drove the urgency and attendance of the meeting. As for the meeting itself, what I witnessed there shocked me, when I was still young enough to be shocked by adult misconduct.

Let me set the stage as to what new math was all about, and what I learned as I experienced it generally in class the next several years. It was meant to be a new approach to teaching math, more in sync with the developments in the higher mathematical world, at once more innovative and less dogmatic, emphasizing creativity and “discovery learning”, not rote memorization. The particular books we used were produced by a set of Yale mathematicians, collectively called the School Mathematics Study Group or SMSG. SMSG basically had four features: it emphasized set theory, which looks at numbers as collections of thing; it showed that base 10, which is the mathematical framework we use as our ordinary number system, was arbitrary, based more or less on us having 10 fingers and 10 toes, and we could express any number by using other bases; it introduced Boolean algebra, which revealed that algebra is not just numbers but both numbers and logic; and finally, it illustrated how mathematics is subject to some fairly straightforward laws that are worth knowing, such as the commutative law, which states that A+B is the same as B+A for any A and for any B (2+3 always equals 3+2). Hardly dramatic stuff, or so I thought.

The meeting was loud, boisterous, attacking, emotional and, from what I could see as a naive 12-year-old, ignorant. New math, it was argued in this meeting in no uncertain terms, would destroy our economy by shooting down American science, engineering, innovation, and the military. It would poison and confuse young minds forever (even then, I thought the supposed influence of a 4th period math teacher on my long-term future to be stupendously over-rated). It would overturn what had always worked (supposedly) for something that likely would not. It would drag down our country, particularly in its fight against communism. It might even be a communist plot. Much to my surprise, never addressed were the four innovations of SMSG: sets, bases, logic, laws. In fact, later math study showed me that all mathematics is rooted in set theory and the math of formal logic that defines computer language is defined by sets; that that computer language is not in base 10, but base 2, and the failure to understand that disqualifies you from getting past the first 5 minutes of programming; Boolean algebra has allowed for the circuitry of chips, a dazzling array of the technology that supports modern life (from the creation of power grids, water purification plants, and financial instruments such as options, the fuzzy logic which expands probability theory), and the mathematical laws that govern modern physics is conducted. It is the math necessary to run electronic devices, power plants, vehicles, and the physical chemistry undergirding modern medicine.

The weaknesses of the particular SMSG curriculum were many, including its difficulty to teach by those with an old math education. Even we students understood some of its frivolous treks to nowhere, suggesting SMSG stood for “Some Math, Some Garbage”. But its fundamental truth was never at issue, not in the academic literature or in the school board meetings around the country. It was unorthodox, untraditional, alien, and disruptive: all worrisome and dangerous characteristics to many in authority and to the many more of their unwitting followers. The fact is that those followers fundamentally did not know what they were talking about, had not been trained as mathematicians, had not read the SMSG curriculum, did not know base 2 from base 60 (clocks), from base 360 (circles and globes) and would not have be able to understand the commutative law if it hit them over the head. That should have disqualified them from any comment, but historically, popular attacks on new knowledge are often untethered from the search for truth, any understanding of methodology, or a non-emotional attempt to figure out reality.

Two famous legal trial examples are depressingly instructive here. In the 16th century, the Italian scientist and Dominican friar, Giordano Bruno, held a number of new views: the earth travels around the sun, the cosmos has no center, stars are other suns with their own planets, and there is no hierarchical universe, but one “endless and limitless, and to that extent infinite and indeterminable.” These views, according to the Roman Catholic Church, and the large populace in much of Europe that adhered to its pronouncements, were contrary to the faith, to the Trinity, to Incarnation, to Transubstantiation and to the Mass. The Church was probably right about that. In 1600, Pope Clement VIII found Bruno to be a heretic, the Inquisition then sentenced him to death, and the secular authorities, in obedience to that authority, then carried out the sentence. Bruno was hung upside down naked, a metal plate nailed to his tongue, at Rome’s Campo’ de Fiori and burnt at the stake, his ashes scattered in the Tiber.

The second example is the trial of State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes in 1925. Scopes was a high school biology teacher tried as a criminal defendant, essentially for teaching his students evolution in violation of state law. That law, the Butler Act of 1925, stated that “it shall be unlawful for any teacher…to teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” The authorities thought Scopes violated that by teaching the evolutionary theory of Darwin and, again, they were probably right. Their reasoning for bringing charges, as summed up in the closing argument of the chief prosecutor, the former Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryant, was straightforward: “If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene. His teachings, and His teachings alone, can solve the problems that vex the heart and perplex the world.” What chance does the truth of science, empiricism, biology, or physical evidence without any miracles have here? After an 8-day trial, representation by America’s best and most feared lawyer, Clarence Darrow, the jury took 9 minutes to find Scopes guilty.

Knowledge is often unpleasant, counter-intuitive, annoying, hurtful, alarming, and maddening. It only asks to be true, and such issues as running contrary to religion, the Church, tradition, state authority, pride of place, one’s role in the world, or reverence for ancestors do not generally count. Yet that is exactly the set of issues being employed against two current candidates for new knowledge: the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory. These both are empirical ideas, based on evidence of the role of slavery segregation and disparate treatment of racialized groups in America. They are empirical (based on evidence well-established in the academic literature), corrective (based on omissions or mischaracterizations in school curricula), correctable (as the authors of the 1619 Project made a number of changes in response to a letter and then to an article by five prominent historians pointing out what they thought to be specific errors), and fallible (clinging to a view of Founding Fathers’ intentions in seeking independence were grounded in a fear of British slave emancipation, when that view is dubious or very minimal). In short, reasonable candidates for a new and improved fact-based theory of history. They have been met with something short of facts.

First, the complexities and nuances, not to mention variations, are numerous. One could locate particular paragraphs or arguments that could, with some justification, raise objections. In this way, they are like any set of social science ideas. That said, broadly speaking, what does each actually hold?

The older is Critical Race Theory. It is essentially a legal analysis, which holds that the bland, liberal principles of justice and equality, which may seem unexceptionable and benign in their standard application, can often, in certain kinds of societies carrying the baggage of inequality, be insufficient to explain the real treatment of racial minorities. For example, allowing everyone into a state college with a certain SAT score may seem like liberal equality, or basically the right thing to do, but it ignores the educational disparities of demographically worse off students educated in inferior schools, while that demographic itself may be tied to earlier refusal to sell or finance certain housing in certain neighborhoods by racial minorities, and so allow them to create wealth. The system creates disparities then that continue into the next generation’s educational and employment opportunities. Barred opportunity creates later missed opportunity. Critical Race Theory points this out, calls it “systemic”, and illustrates it more often through stories than statistics. That said, how systemic, when episodic rather than systemic, how intentional versus opportunistic, and how malevolent or ubiquitous rather than negligent or occasional are all questions that vary from one theorist to another. It is, in any case, at all times a supplement, and a small one at that, to the larger social and historical picture presented throughout the educational system.

The 1619 Project is an ongoing journalism effort developed by the New York Times which “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery in the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States’ national narrative.” A number of the original pieces contain provocative and controversy-engendering titles – “America wasn’t a democracy until Black Americans made it one.” American capitalism is brutal. You can trace that to the plantation.” “How false beliefs in physical racial difference still lives in medicine today.” – but, upon closer examination, even these titles might seem far more humdrum. A pure democracy, by definition, requires universal suffrage, including for Blacks; capitalism can be brutal (slavery, indentured servitude, child labor, inhumane working conditions, dangerous jobs) and the first real capitalist enterprise in America was initiated with the importation of slaves; while persisting medical misconceptions, even bias, persist ,about such matters as Blacks experiencing pain, their lung function, the need for particular medications and other verifiable matters. 

More importantly, the Black experience, and the experience of others in communities with and interacting with Blacks, have long been considered to be at both the center of the American experiment and at the root of much of what might be called America’s original sin, (although that might be contested when measured against the large-scale theft and mass killing of those native to this country and living here before European settlements). The phrase “at the very center” may be a bit of hyperbole (it may not be, as well), but the central place of slavery and the role of Blacks in agriculture, industry, the military, the arts, and the workforce generally; the landscape of their suffering, bondage, victimhood, terror, lynching, and treatment as inferiors; plus their contributions to science, technology, journalism, law, music, and literature, to name just a few matters, have fundamentally shaped America. Nor is this a recent discovery. While the historical literature has often been woefully flawed in talking about race, the neglected reality has always been painfully clear, as shown by Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Hope Franklin, and Gunnar Myrdal, among others. The 1619 Project is the latest attempt, and one drawing on the now enormous academic literature that supports many of its conclusions.

Both Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project, as I stated earlier, are ongoing works in progress, with some flaws in their methods, exaggerations in their claims, oversimplifications in their examination of intentions, and overly microscopic focuses on a single aspect of society to the occasional omission of others. In that way – interesting, provocative, revealing, and scholarly, but fallible, incomplete, and occasionally missing the mark – they look like every other social science theory, from capitalism to behavioral psychology, from the Whig theory of history to structural functionalism, from monetary theory to Keynesianism. They are a set of ideas, to be added to, not to replace, any particular curriculum or course. Moreover, the ideas are hardly radical: they comport with recent scholarship by those who labor in the historical field, that is, in libraries, archives, and collections of yellowed and decaying documents. They are considered, even by their serious critics, like Professor Wilentz of Princeton, to remedy a significant gap in historical teaching. Wilentz wrote that he “wholeheartedly supports the stated goal [of the 1619 Project] to educate widely on slavery and its long-term consequences.” Where is the problem, then?

Basically there are two kinds of problems: one a valid argument based on a false premise, the second based on a true premise but itself a false argument. The first is empirical, but lacks the real facts because, like the parents arguing against SMSG, the critics hadn’t bothered to read the actual literature. The second is emotional, as it is worried about the iconoclastic view of new theory toward the old icons. Like the interrogators of Bruno, all clergy, and the prosecutors of Scopes, all Biblical fundamentalists, there were matters at stake more important than truth. 

Facts first. There are a number of factual criticisms of the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory, ranging from the motives for independence of the founding fathers, to the merits and effectiveness of a number of civil rights laws to Lincoln’s racial views, to the observation that there were, in fact, slaves in what is now the United States before 1619. They, and others, have different degrees of validity and importance. 

In that way, they are like criticisms of historical explanations generally. Such explanations of the past are always based on controversial and insufficient evidence, sources of mixed plausibility and integrity, restrictions on the researcher’s ability to gather all the information that he or she might want, limitations on time, and problems of translation, access, and familiarity with various other disciplines and other theories. The historical literature – matters such as the rise and fall of ancient Athens, the decline of the Roman empire, the reasons for the rise and then internal wars of Christianity, the origins and implications of the Enlightenment, the causes of the Civil War and World War I, the rise of nationalism, the role and elimination of slavery in the rise Modern Europe, the origins of capitalism and communism, the place of women and the indigenous in any number of countries and societies throughout history, and the motivations of almost every ancient, medieval and modern leader in doing what they did and why they did whatever it is they did –  is inherently controversial as written by various historians and largely remain controversial today. Certainly, discoveries are made, information is learned, knowledge is added, and we feel more confident that something approaching truth and accuracy has come to light, but that confidence is always tempered by new discoveries, reconsideration of existing positions, and nagging questions that remain unanswered. 

Take two of the historians who criticized the 1619 Project: Sean Wilentz and Gordon Wood. Wilentz has been criticized for offering little to no explanation as to why slavery was not eliminated by the founding fathers or in the early Republic on the one hand, and seems to see little or no input by Blacks in any of the considerations or policy origination during the colonial or postcolonial times, despite any number of historians offering both better explanations and a richer conversation about such input. Wood, in his large tome, The Creation of the American Republic, has in his index but a single listing for “Negroes” and none for slavery. Perhaps that is why the “important” letter of the five critics also states that they “applaud all efforts to address the centrality of slavery and racism to our history.” Wilentz even admitted that “Each of us, all of us, think that the idea of the 1619 Project is fantastic. I mean, it’s just urgently needed.”

But it is not the academic debate that is driving the conversation, just as it was not the academic debate that placed Bruno on the stake (as at least since Copernicus the scholars were with him), nor indicted Scopes (as the scientific community by the 1920s enjoyed near unanimity on the compelling evidence of the theory of evolution), nor castigated new math (as mathematicians generally were all “new mathematicians” even if some had methodical reservations as to how ought to be taught in junior high and high school). The arguments were emotional, visceral and apocalyptic, protective of the past because it was their past, and of authority and its heroes because they were their authority and their heroes. That is true here as well. Crowds at school board meetings – as ignorant of what Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project actually states as were their predecessors in the same school board meetings a half century ago in attacking new math – make accusations about tainting their heroes, undermining the American way of life, questioning patriotism, downplaying American greatness, all marginal or unrelated to what is in the actual curriculum. One can be a patriotic German today without denying the Holocaust, a proud Japanese yet admitting the Rape of Nanjing, a loyal Serb ashamed of the Srebrenica Massacre, and an advocate for America without denying the pernicious past of outrageous and immoral treatment of Blacks and Native peoples. 

That this near hysteria is occurring is hardly surprising given a leadership agenda from the right against these programs. To pick a few examples: Rich Lowry of the National Review called it an odious and reductive lie that racism is the essence of America. John Daniel Davidson of the Federalist said that it was a sweeping historical revisionism in the service of contemporary left-wing politics. Erik Erickson, the conservative blogger and radio personality long associated with Restate, said that the 1619 Project could trigger the overthrow of the U.S. government. 

Meanwhile, their counterparts in political office have hardly employed more restrained rhetoric. Gov. Ron DeSantis said that “Critical Race Theory teaches kids to hate our country and to hate each other. It is state-sanctioned racism and has no place in Florida schools.” Sen. Tom Cotton introduced a bill in the Senate prohibiting the armed forces and any of the service academies curriculum from promoting “anti-American and racist theories”, specifically mentioning  Critical Race Theory in the bill. In a remarkable statement untethered from the weight of the actual literature, Sen. Ted Cruz said that “Critical Race Theory seeks to turn us against each other, and if someone has a different skin color, seeks to make her take that person.” Rep. Ken Buck calls it Marxist, divisive and harmful, and Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell said that 1619 is no more than activists’ propaganda that should be stripped of federal educational support. Bills in a number of states seek to ban it in public schools. Banning ideas has an odious aroma, not to mention a troubled history.

Consider the ignorance for a moment, illustrated by Rep. Michael Waltz. Waltz had previously attacked Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley during a Congressional hearing about, among other things, the teaching of Critical Race Theory at West Point. Waltz was later questioned in a CNN interview about that hearing and Waltz’s vehement stand against such a course, even one that was an optional seminar, as it used (in part) a problematic book of Ibram Kendi. Waltz found the book to be highly objectionable. When Brianna Keilar asked about parts of Kendi’s book, Waltz admitted that he had never read it. Flashes of the anti-new math contingent, or maybe of those strongly against, but largely ignorant of, the solar system or evolution.

The array of criticisms of this new knowledge is too diffuse and widespread to fully capture here. The critics essentially complain that if not perfect, significant criticism of America is overblown, destructive, unwarranted, and neglectful of all the good things the U.S. has done. Worse, it is dangerous for young minds. That is, the hard truth should be tempered for children to handle, mindless patriotism should not be undercut, and our heroes ought always to remain heroes. Moreover, society is just too fragile to allow such criticisms, despite the fact that these criticisms have been floating around the law schools and the universities and academic literature for decades, and are reflective of a deep reality about the complex nature of American society since its founding. Not all being children, we should, contrary to the warning of Col. Nathan Jessup in A Few Good Men, be able to handle the truth. Perhaps a final example.

For many, including many in America, the most admired person in recent history is not an American at all, but an Englishman, Winston Churchill. For example, in a Price Waterhouse Cooper survey of 1330 chief executive officers of companies in 68 countries, Winston Churchill was the number one choice as the person from literature or history who best exhibited good leadership. In a YouGov poll to choose the most respected leader of the 20th century, beating out such contenders as Ronald Reagan and Mahatma Gandhi, again Churchill came in first. He is lauded regularly by politicians, journalists, and educators and painted with a glowing aura of greatness morphing into sainthood. He was the first foreigner ever made an Honorary American citizen by the United States Congress. The question then becomes: how great was he? Certainly, great in foresight, preparedness, military strategy, and global perspective. But otherwise? Consider his comments on race, including as Home Secretary in 1910, when he proposed mass sterilization and incarceration of “degenerate” Britons in order to strengthen the race, his stated belief that “the Aryan stock is bound to triumph“ and his advice to the Coupland Royal Commission on Palestine in 1937: “I do not admit… that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it.” 

How should we judge Churchill now? He remains a great war time leader, a shrewd and prescient observer of the menace of Hitler and Stalin, a superb strategist and opportunistic friend, one might say manipulator, of his stronger and necessary allies, Franklin Roosevelt and the U.S. But the rest?

We should be able to be reasonable, rational, and sensible adults about these matters. We should be able to see, to pick a different movie, the good, the bad, and the ugly. For all its flaws, that is what the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory suggest: that American history is a mixed bag, with some of its most pernicious practices haunting us today. How we should assess the mix may be controversial, but the set of appropriate ingredients that make up that mix is indisputable. It is about time we bothered to look.