![]() The idea that civil rights legislation failed to bring about structural change also led to raising a question that Texas House Bill 3979 hopes will become criminal even to ask in public schools in 2021: Was it possible that racism had always been present as an operating principle in a country that declared itself to be founded on the idea that all men were born equal, even as those men owned Black slaves?Īs a school of thought, CRT was pioneered by thinkers such as Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, Cheryl Harris, Richard Delgado, and Mari Matsuda. This shared realization, to these lawyers in training, indicted the narrative of progress that many Americans believed in. As a body of thought, or even a legal movement, it brought together various scholars who interacted, debated, and very often disagreed with each other using a set of shared theoretical propositions: most importantly, that from the mid-1970s to late 1980s, it became apparent that civil rights legislation had failed to bring about the structural changes it promised. ![]() But what is CRT exactly? It began as a sharp and unique, albeit marginalized, school of thought within legal studies. It seems to be a catch-all term for any focus on structural racism. The problem with these laws is that critical race theory has often evaded definition. Texas House Bill 3979 goes so far as to ban any attempt to claim that slavery and racism are not “deviations… from the founding principles of the United States.” Twenty additional states have introduced, or plan to introduce, anti CRT-laws. ![]() Eight states have passed legislation against “critical race theory,” including Idaho, Oklahoma, Tennesee, Texas, Iowa, New Hampshire, Arizona, and South Carolina. When Donald Trump was president of the United States, Fox News inspired him to issue an executive order censuring “critical race theory” in federal diversity seminars. According to the watchdog Media Matters, Fox News had by the fourteenth of July 2021 mentioned “critical race theory” about 1,900 times in a brief period of only 3.5 months. ![]()
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