The affective moralization of educational policy discourse: insights from the case of Critical Race Theory bans

Thinking Problems

Foreword Introduction Part One: Critical Race Theory in Education 1. Just What Is Critical Race Theory and What's It Doing in a Nice Field Like Education? Gloria Ladson-Billings 2. Who's Afraid of Critical Race Theory? Derrick Bell 3. Education Policy as an Act of White Supremacy: Whiteness, Critical Race Theory, and Education Reform, David Gillborn Part Two: History and evolution 4. Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest Convergence Dilemma, Derrick Bell 5. Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative, Mary L. Dudziak Part Three: Affirmative Action 6. The We've Done Enough Theory of School Desegration, Mark v. Tushnet 7. Affirmative Action as a Majoritarian Device: Or, Do You Really Want to Be a Role Model? Richard Delgado 8. Critical Race Theory and Interest Convergence in the Backlash Against Affirmative Action: Washington State and Initiative 200, Edward Taylor Part Four: Critical Race Research Methology in Education 9. Critical Race Methodology: Counter Story-Telling as an Analytical Framework for Educational Research, Daniel G. Solorzano and Tara J. Yosso 10. What's Race Got to Do With It? Critical Race Theory's Conflicts With and Connections to Qualitative Research Methodology and Epistemology, Lawrence Parker and Marvin Lynn Part Five: Race in the Classroom 11. A Threat in the Air: How Stereotypes Shape Intellectual Identity and Performance, Claude M. Steele 12. Peer Networks of African American Students in Independent Schools: Affirming Academic Success and Racial Identity, Amanda Datnow and Robert Cooper Part Six: Intersections: Gender, Class, and Culture 13. Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw 14. Ain't I a Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality, Avtar Brah and Ann Phoenix Part Seven: Intersections: White Supremacy and White Allies 15. The Color of Supremacy: Beyond the Discourse of 'White Privilege', Zeus Leonardo 16. Teaching White Students About Racism: The Search for Whites Allies and the Restoration of Hope, Beverly Daniel Tatum Part Eight: Critiques of Critical Race Theory 17. Some Critical Thoughts on Critical Race Theory, Douglas E. Litowitz 18. Telling Stories Out of school: An Essay on Legal Narratives, Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry 19. On Telling Stores in School: A Reply to Farber and Sherry, Richard Delgado

Midwestern Studies Meets Critical Race TheoryNotes on Imagining the Heartland Jon K. Lauck Britt E. Halvorson and Joshua O. Reno, Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. 218 pp. $85.00 (hardcover), $29.95 (paper). As readers of this journal know better than anyone, the last decade has witnessed a concerted effort to promote and revive Midwestern studies. As consumers of the news in recent years know, the ideas underpinning Critical Race Theory have increasingly been debated in the public square after years of mostly percolating underground in the academy and adjacent institutions. Now comes a direct meeting of the worlds of Midwestern studies and Critical Race Theory in the form of a book published by the University of California Press, which is based in Oakland, California. It is titled Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest and was authored by two anthropologists, one at Colby College in Maine and the other at Binghamton University in New York. In a bit of stage-setting, the University of California Press announces in the book that it "publishes bold progressive books … with a focus on social justice issues—that inspire thought and action among readers worldwide."1 Imagining the Heartland affords an opportunity to consider whether Critical Theory generally, and Critical Race Theory (CRT) in particular, can help us understand the Midwest more completely and accurately or if the reverse is true. At this stage of the discussion, the CRT approach to the study of the Midwest, if this book is a reliable guide, suffers from weaknesses that will cloud our ability to see the region in its fullness and complexity. It serves as a broader warning about the problems associated with Critical Theory more generally and should be a reminder of the importance of relying on more [End Page 126] fruitful ways of examining the history of the Midwest. These include, most importantly, a dedication to collecting and examining the particular facts on the ground when interpreting the Midwestern past and placing them in historical and comparative context with limited use of theories which can predetermine conclusions. At a minimum, before it is widely adopted, CRT and its application in Midwestern studies should be the subject of a robust discussion which can begin in this journal. This discussion will continue in future issues. It should be explained up front that Imagining the Heartland does not rely on original research nor the kind of ethnographic study once-common to anthropology. The book relies on secondary publications, from academic studies to media reports to aspects of popular culture, and analyzes them through the lens of Critical Theory and seeks to explain and critique how other writers and artists have imagined or talked about the Midwest. Critical Theory is not the same as thinking critically about evidence when interpreting the past, an exercise we should all embrace.2 Critical Theory, for the uninitiated, was primarily developed by the Marxists who organized the Frankfurt School of social analysis in Germany in the early twentieth-century and who later, to escape the Nazis, moved its operations to the United States.3 During the last third of the twentieth century, Critical Theory in its various forms became highly influential in humanities and social science departments at American universities. From the general debates and ideas within Critical Theory emerged the more focused CRT, which was made prominent by Derrick Bell at Harvard Law School, in addition to other law professors. Bell and his allies promoted activism and, for them, CRT recognized that "revolutionizing a culture begins with a radical assessment of it" and predicted that "scholarly resistance will lay the groundwork for wide-scale resistance."4 A deep background in the adoption and development of Critical Theory in the academy and an understanding of these goals are helpful when reading this book because that is the source of its ideas and language. This grounding in Critical Theory is important to understand when delving into Imagining the Heartland because the book is quite distinct from some of the research that takes place in Midwestern studies. A good deal of the work in Midwestern history is grounded in studying...

My research is a critical examination of technology policy discourse between four organizational groups: Alberta Education, the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA), the College of Alberta School Superintendents (CASS) and the Alberta School Councils’ Association (ASCA). I adopt a discursive theoretical position, to examine how education policy promotes a way of thinking about technology by endorsing some values over others and is therefore qualitative. One overarching question and a related sub-question guide my inquiry: 1. What ways of thinking about technology are evident in Alberta’s education policy discourse? • What relationship exists between the ways of thinking about technology in Alberta’s education policy discourse and nodal discourses, specifically, the knowledge-based economy and globalization? The literature base informing my inquiry encompasses three fields of research, the philosophy of technology, education policy and critical organizational discourse. Since my study is based on technology policy in education through an interest in discourse, meaning and power, I employ critical discourse analysis to excavate the common sense notions and assumptions in documents and interview data from the four organizations. Feenberg suggests the various ways of thinking about technology can be summarized into four categories, instrumentalism, determinism, substantivism and critical theory (1999). Feenberg’s model (1999) serves as a lens through which to roughly classify the philosophical positions of the organizations. The findings illustrate technology policy discourse in Alberta is divided along the values axis between the ATA and ASCA taking up substantivist and critical theory positions and Alberta Education moving between instrumentalist or determinist positions. In addition, the data suggests a value-neutral view of technology has dominated the discursive field with significant implications on implementation. Despite the apparent philosophical divide in the ways of thinking about technology in education, the concept of 21 century learning emerged across all four philosophical positions. My findings point to a need for future policy dialogue to adopt a more philosophically inclusive and balanced approach to ensure the potential of technology to support student learning does not go unrealized or continue to narrowly support technical goals.

Concerns specific to race have re-surfaced in a way that strategically makes a space useful for realistic discourse in education. By combining performance as culture and critical race theory together, an attempt is made to construct a theoretical framework through which ongoing issues related to multicultural education generally, and race specifically, may be re-visited in search of a dialogical, performative, caring community. This author characterizes major principles of ‘critical performance race theory,’ examines various notions of pedagogy associated with power, culture, and race, and reflects on a sense of fundamental, global humanness. Taken for granted notions about the racial supremacy of one’s own can be disrupted through the progressive development of critically self-reflective dispositions (cautious, courageous, critical, caring, and change).

Teaching (Cooperative) Business: The “Bluefield Experiment” and the Future of Black Business Schools

On First Reading Thomas Dixon Jr. in 2021: What Racist Fiction from Reconstruction Can Teach Us About Building Multiracial Democracy Today

Race is central to every aspect of the criminal justice system in the United States. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), in 2013, black males accounted for 37 percent of the total male prison population in the United States with white males accounting for only 32 percent followed by Hispanic males at 22 percent respectively. In the general population, however, Black males comprise only 6 percent of the total males population while White males constitute 31 percent of the total males population in the U.S. followed by Hispanic males who make up 8.4 percent of the total male population. The conviction of innocent defendants is quite disturbing regardless of race or ethnicity. Nothing is more glaring of this phenomenon than when one considers that African American males make up only 6 percent of the total males population but are reported as committing 52 percent of the murders. It is widely known that the lack of formal processes and constitutional due process in the juvenile justice system and the potential for substantial deprivations of children’s liberty through extensive periods of incarceration has been pervasive, persistent, and ongoing in this country (Juvenile Justice Center, 2020). Critical Race Theory has done nothing less than shed more light on the predictability of youth treatment landing them behind bars for lengthy prison sentences for crimes in which they frequently did not commit. Critical Race Theory falls short, however, of offering any plausible explanations for why so many minority youths are falsely imprisoned. Other theories must be considered as plausible explanations for this phenomenon of disparate treatment between the races whether it be police shooting, disparate convictions and incarceration or racial profiling. These theories include Racial Conflict Theory, Racial Threat Theory and Petit Apartheid Theory. The core idea of Critical Race Theory is that racism does not stop at the individua level, but it is systemic or system-wide and ingrained in our policies, in our legal systems and institutions. Critical Race Theory has absolutely nothing to do with “punishing kids for their skin color or making young white kids feel guilty for being white no more than critical thinking is criticizing someone for well thinking. Critical Race Theory is a dialogue for raising awareness of policies and practices that have had a disproportionately negative impact on racial minorities in particular and youth in general irrespective of race. There were 2,310 people serving life-without-parole sentences for crimes committed as juveniles (known as JLWOP) at the end of 2016. This study examines the data extracted from the national registry of exonerations in the United States on every known exoneration from 1989 to 2020. Contributing factors to such disparate convictions among young African American males such as false confessions, mistaken identity, false accusations, witness tampering, perjury or false statements under oath particularly by police officers, prosecutorial misconduct, inadequate legal defense, and mistaken witness identification are highlighted and discussed as major contributing factors to the exoneree’s eventual release. This study assumes the position that, although all lives matter, it appears that African American Male Youths are more disproportionate among the population of those exonerated for crimes that they did not commit. The study proffers policy implications and policy changes that appear to be viable solutions to this egregious and tragic abuse of humankind.

Discussions about educational content on race and racism have captured widespread public and political attention, with much of this debate falling under the umbrella of critical race theory (CRT). Despite this attention, we currently do not know whether it is the content in these lessons or the CRT label that is influencing opinion on this issue. Are critics of CRT reacting to the content that CRT encapsulates? Or does the phrase “CRT” trigger partisan beliefs that are unrelated or only weakly tied to the central claims CRT advances? We use original data from two experiments in national surveys (N = 1,983) to answer these questions. In the first experiment, respondents were randomly assigned to one of three vignette conditions that described a local high school board’s decision to ban a lesson by either (1) describing the content of the lesson, (2) labeling the lesson as CRT, or (3) both describing and labeling the lesson. In the second experiment, a subset of respondents was assigned to conditions where the school board approved the lesson rather than banning it. Results indicate that labeling a lesson as CRT leads to opposition—either agreeing with its ban or disagreeing with its approval—regardless of whether a description of the lesson is included. Subgroup analyses are suggestive of the idea that although baseline levels of support varied, this label impacts individuals across a wide array of sociodemographic and political groups.

Since former President Trump’s 2020 Executive Order banning critical race theory, the scholarship has been at the center of an international moral panic. Right-wing American, British, and French commentators invented a conspiracy theory version of critical race scholarship (Marxism! Black supremacy!). Once constructed, conspiracists blamed critical race theory for several alleged social ills, including making white kids uncomfortable and destroying nationalist sentiment. Although the acute stage of this moral panic may be receding, critical race theory’s reputation as a body of scholarship aimed at diagnosing and curing racial inequality is tarnished. Scholars concerned about racial inequality—for intellectual and ethical reasons—should be worried, as it will likely take time to reverse the damage. Answering objections from academic and lay opponents of critical race theory, Ali Meghji’s The Racialized Social System: Critical Race Theory as Social Theory shows what recovering from this moral panic will look like. Contra academic detractors who claim that critical race theory does not provide a coherent analytical framework, Meghji contextualizes the development of critical race theory in legal studies in relation to the broader set of critical theories of race and racism that were bubbling up in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The theoretical imprimatur of these currents runs deep, as these intellectual movements were part of a long lineage of radical thought from racially marginalized scholars such as Oliver Cromwell Cox, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Joyce Ladner. For lay readers (and I’m sure this book will draw interested non-specialists), Meghji provides an accessible overview showing critical race theory’s explanatory power across the social sciences.

The frequent police killings during the COVID-19 pandemic forced a reckoning among Americans from all backgrounds and propelled the Black Lives Matter movement into a global force. This manuscript addresses major issues to aid practitioners in the effective treatment of African Americans via the lens of Critical Race Theory and the Bioecological Model. We place the impacts of racism on Black families in historical context and outline the sources of Black family resilience. We critique structural racism embedded in all aspects of psychology and allied fields. We provide an overview of racial socialization and related issues affecting the parenting decisions in Black families, as well as a detailed overview of impacts of structural racism on couple dynamics. Recommendations are made for engaging racial issues in therapy, providing emotional support and validation to couples and families experiencing discrimination and racial trauma, and using Black cultural strengths as therapeutic resources.

The research aims to analyze the debate on Critical Race Theory in the United States and the conservative reaction, focusing on the anti-CRT campaign in schools and pending and approved federal and state legislations related to anti-racist education, among 2020 and 2022. To this end, the research answers what critical race theory is from the perspective of its theorists, contextualizes the advance of the extreme right and the CRT as its symbolic enemy representing resistance to anti-racist education, and analyzes the related changes to the subject at the federal and state legislative level. It is argued that the attacks on the CRT and the efforts surrounding race debate and anti-TCR legislation are part of an ideological effort to delegitimize the American nation's historical perspectives of race and racism, prevent marginalized groups from participating in civic life, and maintain the racial status quo and political power. This ideological effort is part of a broader and transnational movement articulated by conservative groups that use institutional mechanisms to block the advancement of progressive agendas, highlighting the strong polarization and division of North American society in the actions involved in combating racism. From the lens of Critical Race Theory, we analyzed and mapped anti-CRT legislation or legislation against education and the race debate. The research is based on federal and state legislation, such as Federal Executive Orders decreed by presidents and state Executive Orders decreed by governors, and state bills and laws. Through mapping and analysis, it is possible to identify the wave of legislation against the CRT, more specifically against the debate on race, which is being built as a movement against anti-racist education in schools, higher education institutions and public and private institutions.

Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) scholars have recently drawn on critical race theory (CRT) to critique and understand the propagation of Whiteness as a norm associated with native English speakers. However, the area of language studies, more broadly defined, has yet to develop the same link with CRT. To this end, this article proposes and introduces an emerging theoretical and analytical framework called LangCrit, or Critical Language and Race Theory. LangCrit puts the intersection of the subject-as-heard and the subject-as-seen at the forefront of interpretation and analysis. This article urges language studies scholars, both within the field of English language teaching and beyond, to continue to look for ways in which race, racism, and racialization intersect with issues of language, belonging, and identity.

Author Biographies

Deeply divided opinions about critical race theory (CRT) forced school board candidates to take positions on an issue that most Americans know little about. Because there is so much uncertainty about what CRT entails, it is possible that a candidate’s reason for their position on CRT, or their willingness to allow parents control over its teaching, could affect the candidate’s appeal to voters. This paper describes two survey experiments, the first of which tested whether a school board candidates’ justification for their position on CRT could affect the approval of the candidate. Results suggest that Democrats prefer candidates who express favorable attitudes toward CRT and, to a lesser extent, an emphasis on identity. Republicans, on the other hand, prefer candidates who emphasize equality over identity and were less affected by the candidate’s position on CRT. A second survey experiment tested whether opponents of CRT would tolerate a school board candidate who speaks positively of CRT but believes parents should wield control over the school curriculum, rather than a school board. Results showed that when the candidate supported parent choice instead of asserting the school board’s authority on the matter, support increased significantly.