I’ve taught Critical Race Theory. Here’s what it really threatens

For over three decades I’ve taught social theory — the various perspectives that philosophers, social scientists, and other scholars have used to make sense of the social world. Some of these perspectives fall under the heading of “critical race theory,” about which much misguided panic is now flourishing.

Critical race theory, or CRT for short, indeed has bite, but it is hardly the threat to Western civilization that its opponents have made it out to be. In fact, it can be seen as a tool for understanding how U.S. society falls short of its ideals, and what can be done about it.

Critics of CRT have charged that it is Marxist, that it makes white students feel guilty about racial injustice, and that it divides rather than unites people across racial lines. These charges are plain wrong. Properly understood, CRT is not Marxist, guilt inducing, or divisive.

Real Marxists are skeptical of CRT because, as they see it, CRT downplays class conflict. Whereas CRT sees racial oppression as driving much of U.S. history, Marxists see economic exploitation as the central dynamic. Marxists and proponents of CRT are often at odds over this matter of whether race or class is of primary importance.

And whereas some proponents of CRT see racism as intractably baked into U.S. society, Marxists are more hopeful. They believe racism will wither once there is no capitalist class promoting racism as a way to divide working people. Pundits who have pushed anti-CRT hysteria in the popular media seem to be clueless about these divergences between CRT and Marxist theory.

Does CRT make white students feel bad about themselves, as critics have also claimed? This is not what I’ve seen in university classrooms.

What CRT argues, in a nutshell, is that racial gaps in wealth, power, and status persist not because of conscious hatred or malicious discrimination, but because of unconscious biases and the routine ways that institutions operate to benefit some groups at the expense of others. In this view, racial inequality is not the result of bad moral character but of beliefs and practices inherited from the past.

CRT doesn’t say that white people today should feel guilty about this. We are not, most proponents of CRT would say, responsible for the sins of previous generations. What we are responsible for, if we care about justice and want our institutions to promote it, is making change.

No doubt these ideas can fuel tension. Coming to see how we harbor unrecognized biases and how we benefit, inadvertently, from laws and customs that previously seemed neutral can be unsettling. Defenders of CRT would say that this is the price of progress toward a more just society. All education, I would say, costs some degree of unease.

In my experience, most white students who study CRT feel relief — precisely because they no longer feel blamed for what is beyond their control. They also come to see that it is possible to put their beliefs in fairness and equality into practice by challenging the biases and taken-for-granted practices that produce inequalities. For many white students, these are liberating insights.

Introspection and good intentions, CRT makes clear, are not enough. What’s needed to make change is collaboration across racial lines. In this sense, CRT promotes solidarity, not division. At least in principle.

To be sure, facing the imperative to work for justice rather than just endorse it can cause strain. But such strain is not a consequence specific to CRT. It is simply part of the struggle to act on one’s best values in a world that makes it easier not to.

The real threat posed by CRT is not that it causes guilt and division, as uninformed critics have claimed, but that it can do the opposite: extinguish unproductive guilt and bring together people who want to create an America that lives up to its ideals of fairness and meritocracy. This is always the threat when ordinary people begin to question unequal social arrangements and imagine that by uniting, they can overcome them.

Michael Schwalbe is professor of sociology at North Carolina State University.