This is part one of a two-part series exploring critical race theory (CRT) and its influence on diversity and inclusion efforts in workplaces and classrooms.
Julia Carrie Wong is a senior reporter for The Guardian, and she’s been covering the ongoing debate around CRT in schools and federal employee trainings. CRT is an academic discipline that teaches that racism is deeply embedded into U.S. legal and political systems.
Wong talks with host Porter Braswell about what CRT is, efforts to ban CRT from classrooms, and why some institutions are resistant to making CRT a standard educational tool.
HBR Presents is a network of podcasts curated by HBR editors, bringing you the best business ideas from the leading minds in management. The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harvard Business Review or its affiliates.
JULIA CARRIE WONG: Critical race theory is probably an easier way to have these conversations because it doesn’t require personal guilt. It’s about looking at, you know, the founding documents of the country. It’s about looking at the laws and the way that institutions were set up and the ways that banks worked and healthcare work and looking at those things and examining them.
So it is actually quite a bit less personal, and less kind of focused on the sense of how am I personally implicated in this.
PORTER BRASWELL: From HBR Presents, this is Race at Work. The show that explores how race impacts our careers and lives. I’m Porter Braswell. I left a Wall Street career to start a company called Jopwell because I wanted to help corporate America build a more diverse workforce. Each week, we talk to a different leader about their experience with race and how it impacts our daily lives.
We’re in the middle of a big shift around how we talk about race from media to education, big corporations, to small non-profits, and it affects workplaces everywhere. There are a lot of discussions to be had about how race affects our daily lives. The institutions we’re a part of, policies, et cetera. So when we engage in the topic of race at work, it can often get political.
In this episode, we’re going to talk about a topic that’s gained a lot of attention in the past year or so. Critical race theory and why there’s been an effort to ban it from federal employee trainings and classrooms. Critical race theory or CRT for short is a complex school of thought. It’s been cited as the foundation of all diversity and inclusion efforts, both directly and indirectly.
In the final two episodes of the season, we’re going to divide our conversation about CRT into two parts so that we can really understand how this shows up in our everyday lives. For the first part, we talked to Julia Carrie Wong, a senior reporter for The Guardian who’s reported on the quote, “moral panic” around CRT. We started our conversation breaking down the ABCs of CRT.
So in this episode, what I would love to do with you is treat me like a kindergartner. Treat me as if I know nothing about critical race theory and just talk about what it is and what’s the big discussion around it.
JULIA CARRIE WONG: Sure. Broadly speaking, critical race theory is a body of thought that was developed by legal scholars at Harvard law school in the 1980s, Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado were some of the thinkers who were behind this movement.
And basically it started with a question as a lot of good scholarship does, which was after the civil rights movement after the passage of civil rights legislation, the society started to achieve kind of what looked on its face to be legal equality. And the question was why had that not automatically translated into defacto equality?
Why do we still have so much racial inequality in the United States? And so Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, these thinkers were kind of posing the question. Can we look further and further our understanding of what racism is to understand how has racism and racial inequality been embedded into law and into the major institutions that shape so much of American life, how has that inequality been embedded there to enable racial inequality to continue? And so this mode of questioning helped to kind of establish ideas about the ways that systemic racism works and the ways that institutional racism works. It also helped to bring forward ideas about, say intersectionality and so much as it’s a way of interrogating our reality and trying to understand it.
PORTER BRASWELL: So is it fair to say that this is a lens in which to interpret policy structures and systems and how it plays out to impact communities of color in a negative way? Is that a fair way of kind of summarizing it?
JULIA CARRIE WONG: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s a way of thinking. It’s a way of questioning. It’s not necessarily the answer so much as it is asking the question.
PORTER BRASWELL: Why is there so much controversy around it right now?
JULIA CARRIE WONG: I mean, it speaks to a very fundamental question about why racial inequality persists in American society, and that’s a question that really hits that very fundamental myths and narratives and stories that people in this country tell themselves about who we are as a nation, who we are as a people.
So on the one hand that is always going to be controversial and emotional for people. And that’s something that has happened throughout US history. When you have a country that is founded on the idea of equality, at the same time that it is founded with literal inequality embedded into the constitution, you’re going to constantly have a struggle to reconcile those two things.
And that is very deep and very kind of fraught throughout US history. At the same time, there has been a very concerted push by individuals and institutions on the right, you know, it’s, it’s become a branding mechanism whereby broadly the general public kind of coming to believe that there is actually is something to be said that America’s problems go deeper than individual racism.
That it’s not just about individual actions, that there is something, you know, more serious going on, where people are existing in these broader structures. That kind of much more popular conception of how racism works in the US is very threatening to the right and the creation of this movement against critical race theory, I think has been a tool for this reactionary movement to kind of rally around.
PORTER BRASWELL: And critical race theory, as you’ve touched upon is nothing new. This is a way of thinking that has been around for decades. So what was it that recently triggered this to become in the spotlight? Where it’s, you turn on the television and you hear people talking about it.
JULIA CARRIE WONG: So it’s a bit complicated. You have individual actors, you have institutions that have been pushing this, and then you kind of have the right wing media.
But, you know, I would say that broadly, the current kind of what I would call a moral panic about critical race theory — I think it’s pretty easy to draw a line between this and the quote unquote racial reckoning of last year. After the murder of George Floyd, after this uprising that saw millions of people take to the streets, there was a lot of organizations, companies, institutions of higher learning, other institutions decided to take on the question of trying to interrogate their own institutional racism and to see if there were ways that they could fix that. Some of those efforts, I think have been really positive. Some of them are often kind of ham-fisted, some of them are maybe going down the wrong lens. You know, there’s a, there’s a big gap between the scholarly work of critical race theory and the practical application of ideas that you see in things like diversity trainings and in like adjusting curriculum. But basically, what we’ve seen is that a number of individuals and a number of conservative think tanks — so the heritage foundation, the Manhattan Institute, especially — they kind of latched on to these reforms efforts and latched on to it as something that was threatening and something that they thought was rather than being anti-racist, they said that actually anti-racism is anti-white and that this is actually racism against white people. And they branded that as critical race theory, the results of the racial reckoning, the changes that people were seeing, whether it was getting an email from a university saying that they were going to try to address some of these issues or being at your workplace, being encouraged to take part in some kind of training.
Those were seen as very threatening.
PORTER BRASWELL: So, so how does that, what, what you called moral panic shape the way we look at critical race theory?
JULIA CARRIE WONG: They’ve been telling a story about critical race theory that is very much not a new narrative. So they’ll tell you that people like Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw, they’re thinking grew out of the Frankfurt school, which is an intellectual movement of German Jewish intellectuals in the 1930s, who were influenced by Marx but also disagreed with Marx. And this is kind of called critical theory, and it looked at the ways that the culture was influential.
For many years now, people that have advanced a conspiracy theory about cultural Marxism, quote unquote, the idea being that Theodor Adorno and Marcuse, and these members of the Frankfurt school have been controlling the culture and poisoning the well in order to advance communism and liberalism and kind of sexual liberation and racial mixing.
And so the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory has always focused on that connection to the Frankfurt school and it takes what is kind of the natural intellectual influence of very influential thinkers who, you know, legitimately have influenced generations of thinkers that have come beyond them and kind of turns it into a scandal and turns it into something that, you know, seems nefarious.
And so very much what has been done with critical race theory is a mirror of that, where you are again, hearing the same kind of conspiratorial narrative, that critical race theory is actually critical theory. And that, that actually drew out of Marxism and it’s really just kind of not true.
PORTER BRASWELL: Yeah. So when did we start seeing policy change in the government? Why or how did this take off?
JULIA CARRIE WONG: Yeah, that’s a very successful narrative. There’s a reason that people believe in conspiracy theories because they speak to, you know, questions that people have in doubts and uncertainties. And so we saw in the fall of last year, Donald Trump actually responded directly to a appearance that Christopher Rufo had on the Tucker Carlson show, where he was advancing this idea, that critical race theory was the bogeyman that was coming to steal your children. And he actually ended up writing and enacting an executive order attempting to ban these quote unquote divisive concepts from being spread in the US government. The executive order itself, there were legal challenges to it, which I think were successful.
And when Biden came in, he withdrew it anyways. But the language that they used, which kind of attempts to be neutral, but it’s also quite clearly aimed at trying to prevent people from teaching the idea that America was racist at its foundation, which is a hard thing to argue with when the legislative sessions began in the states, there’s just been a huge and kind of accelerating push.
PORTER BRASWELL: Okay. So how many states are actually creating policies to potentially ban critical race theory? And what would the actual ban entail?
JULIA CARRIE WONG: The laws attempting to ban critical race theory in education have been proposed in at least 22 states. They’ve been enacted in Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas.
And there’s also been statewide resolutions passed by the boards of education in Florida and Georgia. And the Utah state legislature also passed a statewide resolution. It, it’s very difficult to know exactly how this is going to play out. And I did actually interview a first amendment attorney with the ACLU.
And my expectation is that a lot of these laws are going to be challenged in the courts and we’ll have to see what happens, but ultimately what a lot of them do is they kind of define a series of so-called divisive concepts, which include things that sound kind of facially neutral. So a difference of concept will be to say that any single race or ethnicity is responsible for oppressing another race or ethnicity or any single race or ethnicity is superior to another race or ethnicity.
And so they’ll define that as a device of concept and then ban the teaching of those divisive concepts in the schools. And the one that seems to really get at it is this idea that they’re banned from the idea of teaching that the United States and any individual state was racist at its founding.
Which makes it again, of course, very difficult to teach about what is actually in the US constitution or what was actually going on at the time of the US founding. And so that’s kind of the language that gets most explicitly at what these bills are trying to accomplish. Some of them actually explicitly named the 1619 Project and say that materials from it are not allowed to be taught, but the language is pretty vague. What’s not really vague is kind of the statements of the politicians that are promoting it. We who have made it very clear that what they’re trying to do is root out, quote unquote, critical race theory and remove it from the classroom to the extent that it was there.
Some of them are targeting higher education. Some of them are targeting trainings that would take place for public workers, you know, workplace trainings for adults. But a lot of them are using kind of the same core language to try to deny the idea that America was racist at its founding. And to deny the idea that children should be taught about how racism functions, denying the idea that children should, you know, learn an accurate version of US history.
PORTER BRASWELL: I appreciate that context, because that is a very comprehensive background to help us understand how we got to where we are today and where the criticism stems from going all the way back to former thinkers and trying to scare people into believing that if you think a certain way, then you are against America and how that has kind of played out now in critical race theory.
When I have conversations with my friends and this topic comes up, to me, I just, I try to explain that it’s very simple. It’s a way of thinking about and viewing history with the lens of race. Like to deny that race has played a large role, in the development of this country, that racism, I should say that racism has played a large role in the development of this country.
It’s not acknowledging the history of this country. It’s not acknowledging that people were brought here as slaves to build up an economy. It’s not acknowledging that there have been rights taken away from individuals forever for the history of this country, taking land away from people and critical race theory is a way to understand and look at systems, policies, and laws, and help to understand how we got to where we are.
It’s really nothing more than that. And it’s a tool that educators can leverage to make sense, and try to help people understand how we got to where we are. And so the controversy around it, to me, is just a clear misunderstanding as to the intention of why it exists, why it’s a theory, why people practice it.
JULIA CARRIE WONG: Right. I mean part of what we’re seeing here is that this is, I mean, there has been a concerted misinformation campaign, or I guess since it’s concerted, it might be more accurately described as a disinformation campaign. You have figures like Christopher Rufo, who has been the leader of this movement on kind of a pseudo intellectual level.
Who in his own speaking and writing has been very honest about the fact that he is not being honest about critical race theory. This is a useful brand to be applied to what is ultimately reactionary, but relatively common feelings among Americans. You know, things are changing and people don’t feel comfortable with that and giving them the idea that they’re not the problem.
They’re not the ones that maybe need to adjust to change that is coming, but change that is probably overall positive. And instead can say, you’re not the problem. Critical race theory is the problem. And so I do think that on the one hand you have a lot of parents, a lot of people in the general public who might be, just honestly, very confused about what is happening, but I do think it’s important that the leaders of this movement, I don’t think that they are confused or having any misunderstanding. I mean, I think that there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that they know exactly what they’re doing. They’re doing it on purpose.
I mean, this is an effective political tool and it’s one that has been effective throughout US history. You know, this is not the first time that we have seen huge amounts of kind of grassroots concern and anger and reactionary fervor around the question of how to teach US history of what the story is to be taught.
I mean, Kimberlé Crenshaw has herself kind of invoked what happened after reconstruction in the south when discussing what is happening now, you know, after the Civil War, you had this historical period where Black people had equal rights in the south and were elected to office and were voting in huge numbers.
And then this backlash came. This reactionary backlash where huge amounts of violence were enacted against Black people in the south. And the rights were taken back away because white people didn’t actually want Black people to have equal rights. And that lasted for almost a whole century. So the process of kind of progress and reactionary backlash is quite common and it does often play itself out in what is being taught to students.
In the 1930s, there were huge protests and great concern over a series of textbooks that were very popular to the extent that some school boards actually held book burnings. In the 1990s, there was an effort to work with historians to come up with a new set of standards, to teach a kind of more comprehensive version of US history that did not solely focus on white men to expand it, to look at Black history, look at women’s history and look at Chicano history, et cetera. I think that the critical race theory panic is particularly potent in this moment, in part because of the huge amount of support that we’re seeing from the right wing media.
And especially with social media, really being able to create its own very powerful and very effective ecosystem where these ideas can be fed top down to a broad public that is very open and willing to be convinced that the problem is not with anything that they might’ve believed or with anything that they might’ve done, which I mean, often it’s not, but instead that the problem is with, you know, some pointy headed intellectuals who, you know, came up with this idea and are telling you that you’re racist. You know, so it really provides an answer to the feeling of, of discomfort that many people feel when you live in a society that is fundamentally unequal.
PORTER BRASWELL: Yeah. So one of the questions that we ask all of our guests is how do you talk about race at work, but for you specifically, what I would love to hear your perspective on is, how do you advise employees and employers to engage in these politically divisive topics at work? Because again, as we said at the top of the show, race and politics in the day and age that we live in, it, they blend.
If your employees are talking about critical race theory and politically charged things outside of work, A, do you think that there’s a place to discuss that inside the context of work? And if so, is it the employer’s responsibility to create that space? Or should employees just talk about it? Because that’s what they are viewing on television.
JULIA CARRIE WONG: You know, it’s, it’s such a complicated thing. So up until a couple months ago, I was reporting on the tech industry. But I mean, this is, this is an issue that comes up all the time in the tech industry. And you’ve seen, you know, so many kind of blow ups that have happened, you know, at Google, over James Damore or at Facebook over people putting graffiti over signs that said Black Lives Matter.
And then you also have some companies in the tech industry where the CEOs have come out and said, we’re no longer talking about politics at work, which happened at Coinbase and happened at Basecamp. I guess I would just say that. I think that when it comes to people having conversations about race in the workplace or wherever, having difficult conversations — I mean, one of the things that you hear from the critics of critical race theory is that it’s all about making white children feel guilt, that they should not feel about the crimes of their ancestors or not even their ancestors, but white people in America that were enslavers. So there’s a lot of, kind of concern about this idea that if you teach critical race theory, if you talk about this history that you’re going to do emotional harm to children, and that you’re going to put them into a place of feeling guilt, which that in and of itself, I think is a very confused and mistaken idea of critical race theory, which at a pretty fundamental level says that racism is not just about what’s in your soul.
You know, it’s not just about how you personally. As a white person might feel about Black people, or it might feel about other people of color, that this is something about systems. And that it’s something that is built into institutions and is going to require a lot of work to unbuild her and to dismantle.
So, I mean ultimately, like I think that critical research is probably an easier way to have these conversations because it doesn’t require personal guilt and implication. It doesn’t require, you know, you to say, like, this is about my grandfather and my great-great-grandfather it’s about looking at, you know, the founding documents of the country.
It’s about looking at the laws and the way that institutions were set up and the ways that banks worked in credit lending worked and healthcare worked and looking at those things and examining them. Is actually quite a bit less personal and less kind of focused on the sense of how am I personally implicated in this, but it does call into question whether you want to identify with those prior generations of people and that is emotional.
And that is something that I think that people would honestly, it’s just healthier to give up on, but when you are trying to have conversations about race at work, you know, it’s probably easier to approach these things from a substance point of view. And it’s very difficult for most people to think about their own personal implication in it.
PORTER BRASWELL: That’s incredibly helpful. I appreciate that perspective to remove yourself from it. It’s not personal. It’s just the way of trying to explain how we got to where we are, like remove yourself from this. And let’s look at this objectively and talk about how these systems led to the outcomes that we’re seeing play out.
And so if you can remove yourself from that, then I think it becomes easier to engage in that dialogue. Well, thank you for being on the show and again, really appreciate you taking the time and sharing your perspective.
JULIA CARRIE WONG: Great. Well, thank you so much for having me. It’s been great.
PORTER BRASWELL: That’s Julia Carrie Wong, senior reporter for The Guardian. Join us next week for part two of this series, understanding critical race theory and how that affects us at work. We’ll be joined by Laura Gómez, a university of California, Los Angeles law professor who co founded the school’s critical race studies program in 2000.
This episode was produced by Liz Sanchez. Special thanks to Anne Sani and Nick Hendra. Please subscribe to our show on apple podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And don’t forget to share it. We’d really appreciate it.