Introduction: CRT in Higher Education: Confronting the “Boogeyman” Bans, Censorship, and Attacks on Racial Justice

Abstract

It took only a year after 2020’s racial justice uprisings for legislatures in half the states to attempt to ban teaching about systemic racism in US public schools, colleges, and universities. The boilerplate legislation disallows the teaching of “divisive concepts,” including the reality that systemic racism benefits white people. In what Patricia Williams calls “definitional theft,”1 architects of this conservative backlash appropriated “Critical Race Theory” as a catch-all label for those “divisive” concepts2 – even though, as many scholars and journalists attempted to publicly clarify, Critical Race Theory is a specific field of legal scholarship rarely taught in college, let alone elementary and secondary schools. As one of the founders of CRT, Kimberlé Crenshaw, proclaimed: “This is basically an effort to create a boogeyman and pour everything into that category that they believe will prompt fear, discomfort and repudiation on the part of parents and voters who are primed to respond to this hysteria that they’re trying to create.”3 The “definitional theft” isn’t even a secret strategy. One architect of the backlash, Christopher Rufo, announced it proudly in a public Twitter post: “We have successfully frozen their brand – ‘critical race theory’ – into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions.”4