When millions of people around the world watched Derek Chauvin snuff the life out of George Floyd, the topic of race became normal.  People all over the world began to form different perspectives on the topic of race.  His murder ignited fierce political debate around the extent to which racism is ingrained in America.  People all over the world were shocked by his killing and poured into the streets, often under the banner of Black Lives Matter, to protest the killing of Floyd and others, such as Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman who was fatally shot in Louisville, Kentucky by the police in March 2020. Blacks in America became very vocal and argued that  America has yet to come to terms with what they see as a racist history and society.

As Americans began to demand changes in the status quo and requested more programs like diversity and inclusion in the workplace, the trend began to catch on as Fortune 500 companies decided that they would strive for equality and terms like “structural racism” and concepts such as “white privilege” were more heavily debated, some American academics like Subotnik said they saw themes of critical race theory shaping the debate in U.S. media.

According to the Wall Street Journal, on Sept. 1, conservative activist Christopher Rufo appeared on television to discuss his work against critical race theory.

“What I’ve discovered is that critical race theory has become, in essence, the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized against the American people,” Rufo said on “ Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News. Former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff at the time called Rufo the morning after the TV program and asked him to share his findings, saying Trump had watched it, The Wall Street Journal previously reported citing a person familiar with the matter.  On Sept. 4, the White House Office of Management and Budget issued a memo instructing all federal agencies “to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on ‘critical race theory,’ ‘white privilege,’ or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests … that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or … that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.”

How does critical race theory affect institutions of learning?

As of mid-May, legislation purporting to outlaw critical race theory in schools has passed in Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Tennessee and has been proposed in various other statehouses, even though it is not taught in K-12 or at the undergraduate level.  The laws vary widely, and some apply to both K-12 schools and higher education institutions.

Last week, Florida’s State Board of Education approved rules prohibiting schools from teaching “theories that distort historical events,” specifically including critical race theory.   Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, this week signed a bill that bans certain teachings, such as that one race is inherently racist, but the measure doesn’t define critical race theory.  Abbott in a statement said the bill “is a strong move to abolish critical race theory in Texas, but more must be done.”

According to the same article in Education Week, the scholars who study critical race theory in education look at how policies and practices in K-12 education contribute to persistent racial inequalities in education and advocate for ways to change them. Among the topics they’ve studied: racially segregated schools, the underfunding of majority-Black and Latino school districts, disproportionate disciplining of Black students, barriers to gifted programs and selective-admission high schools, and curricula that reinforce racist ideas.

Could a teacher who wants to talk about a factual instance of state-sponsored racism—like the establishment of Jim Crow, the series of laws that prevented Black Americans from voting or holding office and separated them from white people in public spaces—be considered in violation of these laws?

It’s also unclear whether these new bills are constitutional, or whether they impermissibly restrict free speech.

It would be extremely difficult, in any case, to police what goes on inside hundreds of thousands of classrooms. But social studies educators fear that such laws could have a chilling effect on teachers who might self-censor their own lessons out of concern for parent or administrator complaints.

What do adherents of critical race theory say about how racism exists today?

Many academics who back critical race theory argue that white supremacy lives on through the legal system and institutions such as governments that draw power from the law. But that doesn’t mean all individual white people are racist, they say, arguing that a core element of critical race theory is that racism is so ingrained in society that it may transcend individualized behavior. For example, they argue, the net effect of Jim Crow laws and legalized slavery can still be felt today.

Some argue the debate around critical race theory over the past year has deviated from its core legal argument.

Eric Ward, an authority from the Southern Poverty Law Center said that “Critical race theory argues that individuals aren’t bad because they’re white, what it argues is that there are systems that have evolved over time that create disparity based off of race.”

Still, opponents argue the public discourse casts those who disagree as racist. “It comes out in phrases like ‘silence is violence,’ ” Subotnik said.

Most critical race theory scholarship attempts to demonstrate not only how racism continues to be a pervasive component throughout dominant society, but also why this persistent racism problematically denies individuals many of the constitutional freedoms they are otherwise promised in the United States’ governing documents. This enables scholars to locate how texts develop in and through the cultural contexts that produced them, further demonstrating how pervasive systemic racism truly is. Critical race theory scholars typically focus on both the evidence and the origins of racism in American culture, seeking to eradicate it at its roots.

Additionally, because critical race theory advocates attending to the various components that shape individual identity, it offers a way for scholars to understand how race interacts with other identities like gender and class. As scholars like Crenshaw and Willams have shown, critical race theory scholarship can and should be amenable to adopting and adapting theories from related fields like women’s studies, feminism, and history. In doing so, critical race theory has evolved over the last decades to address the various concerns facing individuals affected by racism.