Critical Race Theory, Fire, and Dangerous Things

By Dr. Sharon Ravitch, Professor of Practice, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education

Methodspace readers will recognize Dr. Sharon Ravitch, who served as a Mentor in Residence in March 2020 and has contributed significant posts, including ones on Decolonizing Knowing, and Flux Pedagogy.

She is the author of Qualitative Research: Bridging the Conceptual, Theoretical, and Methodological. Use the code SAGE30 for a discount when ordering from SAGE.

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I looked up at her, cloaked in ancestral confidence, writing words of elder liberation in a handmade notebook. She was meteoric, each soulful word cut through social constructions like a surgeon’s knife—with precision, skill, confidence, unwavering. I asked “Are you Audre Lorde?”

She was. She is. And she will always be THE Audre Lorde, Black lesbian feminist writer and poet, activist, intergenerational luminary. Sitting next to Audre Lorde on a train from Philadelphia to Washington as a Women’s Studies major in college was a turning point, an invitation to a new way of being in the world, seeing the world, understanding the invisible logics that make and remake the world every single day underneath our conscious awareness (until we interrupt it, learning that we can, and must, go against the harmful grain). 

Audre Lorde died later that year, at the age of 58, leaving a legacy of pushing against oppressive structures while making these structures visible. Visibility creates space so those marginalized and harmed by systemic violence do not turn that violence onto ourselves. Space generates resistance so we withstand self-colonization and push against living in a kind of hegemonic daze that constrains dreams and realities. In intentional spaces we can build new tools, because as Audre Lorde (1988) foretold, the tools themselves must be changed by wisdoms borne of suffering and joy and resistance and liberation. Of her many profound writings, one stands out to me in this moment of my 50th year of life:

“I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my nose holes—everywhere. Until it's every breath I breathe. I'm going to go out like a f-ing meteor!”

Audre Lorde

Like these words in A Burst of Light, I too want to write fire with the years I have left. In Audre Lorde’s honor, in her catalytic memory, in her future-seeing vision of radical self-care, personal and collective healing and transformation, and with my White privilege and status in tow, I hope to write a bit of fire about Critical Race Theory in a moment when people who know it well need to step up and interrupt the current madness of political racism. This moment extends beyond a need for change to an ethical imperative to create equity in all spaces of inequity. A CRT framework and approach to storytelling provide new tools for equitable learning and liberation, which I describe after I define Critical Race Theory and explain why it's used as a political football.

CRITICAL RACE THEORY 

So what is Critical Race Theory?

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an academic and legal framework that explicates racism as structural, institutionalized in the history, systems, and policies of the United States. Critical Race Theory recognizes that racism transcends individual bias and prejudice, it is embedded in legal, social, and educational policies and systems that uphold racial inequality. Critical Race Theory acknowledges the continuing impacts of slavery and segregation, illuminating how institutionalized racism perpetuates an inherently unequal system. Critical Race Theory is used to develop laws, policies, and educational approaches that help to dismantle structural inequities and systemic racism and build more equitable futures through the examination of how the United States history of slavery, caste, and systemic racism are foundational to laws and institutions that shape our daily lives to this day (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001).

What are the central tenets of Critical Race Theory?

1. Race is a Social Construct. Critical Race Theory scholars contend that race is a social construct or concept, the product of collective social thought and belief rather than based on fixed and unmoving biological categories or characteristics.

2. Centrality of Racism. Critical Race Theory scholars centralize race and racism as organizing constructs of the United States. They contend that racism transcends individual manifestations of prejudice or racism, rather, it is embedded in societal structures and the legal system. CRT illuminates how racism structures all facets of social and political life.

3. Commitment to Social Justice. Critical Race Theory addresses why racial disparity exists in the United States in an effort to eradicate racism and eliminate oppression. A group of legal scholars in 1993 first identified the goal of Critical Race Theory “The interests of all people of color necessarily require not just adjustments within the established hierarchies, but a challenge to hierarchy itself.” Legal scholars in the 1970s and 80s, following the Civil Rights Movement, put forth Critical Race Theory as a response to the false narrative that society and institutions were “colorblind.” Critical Race Theory holds that racism has never been eradicated from U.S. laws, policies, or institutions, and is still endemic within them. 

4. Sharing Experiential Knowledge. Critical Race Theory scholars explain that the experiences, narratives, and stories of People of Color are critical to understanding racism and changing the U.S. in informed and responsive ways. These narratives come in the form of storytelling, biographies, family histories, testimonios, and are told as counter-narratives to dominant narratives that pathologize and deficitize individuals and communities of color individually and writ large.

5. Cross-Sector Interdisciplinarity. Critical Race Theory contends that there cannot be a singular path, sector, or discipline that leads to liberation from structural racism. Instead, there must be multiple paths coming from across fields and sectors, from strategic partnerships and collaborations that push interdisciplinary inquiry and development (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001).                

FIRE                                         

Why is such a common-sense decades-old framework being attacked?

Critical Race Theory has been around for decades, many have used it as a theoretical framework in our research without a single concern BECAUSE IT IS ACTUALLY NOT CONTROVERSIAL. Boisterously co-opted by opponents of racial equality, Critical Race Theory is misused as a cudgel to scare educators and silence discussions about systemic racism, to ban truthful teaching of U.S. history, and reverse progress toward racial justice.

First, the inaccuracy of lumping Critical Race Theory into a broad category of absolutely anything to do with race or equality. Critical Race Theory remains caught in the crossfires, unjustifiably used to include all diversity and inclusion efforts, race-conscious policies, and education about racism even when there’s no actual connection to Critical Race Theory.

Second, lawmakers and proponents of the bans on Critical Race Theory insist that they advocate for a “balanced view of history” and “patriotic rather than divisive education.” They claim that Critical Race Theory, and talking about racism in any way, even historically, creates divisiveness. Let us stop for a moment of pause: Can you imagine the entitlement to our Nation’s narrative people must feel to act in this way? These bans seek to deny truth about U.S. history, silence dissent, and punish those who speak truth to counter whitewashed falsehoods and the gaslighting of people of color.

Third, Critical Race Theory has come under new fire, why is that exactly? Let’s look at Recent history as a way to answer this question. Record turnout among Black voters in the 2020 election caused fear and concern for opponents of racial equality. As a response to their fear and the power of the Black vote, states passed the strictest voting laws in decades. Moreover, as millions took to the streets to protest U.S. police violence, states responded by passing laws that criminalize protest. As people and institutions across the U.S. began joining together to recognize and address the history and ongoing impact of system racism. This has created the current attempts to silence all discussions of racial inequality by weaponizing schools and teachers and stealing votes from Black citizens.

In reality, bans on Critical Race Theory are no more than racist dog whistles, White hysteria borne of abject racism and a failure of the soul and the system. The problem is that the spin cycle is so powerful and vast that this anti-truth-only-when-it-might-benefit-People-of-Color cabal is once again trying to change the narrative to hide their carceral thievery once again. FACT: Critical Race Theory is not taught in K-12 schools. This means that in reality, these laws seek to ban the teaching of U.S. history, which includes the history of racism and settler-colonialism. These laws seek to ban discussions about how racism shapes U.S. history. Ultimately, these laws are made to ban racial discourse, they are a unified attempt to deny the legacy of racial oppression and struggle in the United States. These bans are direct attacks on truth, history, and free speech—seeking to silence those who speak the whole truth about this country’s history. Bans on Critical Race Theory are part of a coordinated backlash to the realization of a true multi-racial democracy in America.

Critical Race Theory Storytelling as New Tool

Critical Race Theory is a framework for understanding the pervasiveness of institutionalized racism. In the field of education, Critical Race Theory emphasizes storytelling as a powerful method for highlighting and challenging dehumanizing perspectives, practices, and policies in U.S. schooling (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 2016). Counter-narratives are essential to change, they help us to deconstruct, decenter, and disrupt harmful paradigms as we reconstruct, recenter, and rebuild humanizing ones (Pak & Ravitch, 2021).

The epistemic importance of storytelling to Critical Race Theory, and its application in education, means that new narratives are generated directly from students of color in ways that, with intention, are culturally responsive. Storytelling and counter-storytelling is a method for centering marginalized stories and experiences while simultaneously “exposing, analyzing, and challenging the majoritarian stories” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002, p. 138). It enables educators to dismantle dehumanizing norms in schools, while cultivating new, more equitable ones that support all students (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 2016). Storytelling within a CRT framework is a step towards authenticity for all students, healing through being able to understand and grieve parts of our history together as liberation. We should want this for all of our children, and for adults too.

Telling stories develops a living curriculum based on mutual understanding between educators and students. Educators spend hours in professional development sessions that bullet recommendations for teaching, assessing, and behavior management. These top-down recommendations are often provided without consideration of local context and intersectional identities (Khalifa, 2018). This reflects a “banking” model of education, one that positions students as vessels to be “filled” with knowledge rather than as agentic and creative learners (Freire, 1970). By creating space for students to tell their stories and listen to each other’s stories, learning transcends the identification of “best practices” to be implemented to establishing connection and understanding of students and their schooling experiences (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 2016).

In addition to re-framing and enlivening learning, storytelling builds a community of care. Storytelling is relational, it creates intentional dialogic engagement at a deeper level than is the norm in schools. When students tell and retell their stories, they open themselves up to healthy vulnerability and authentic listening. This kind of storytelling creates opportunities for collective meaning-making regarding the systemic issues facing students and communities (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 2016). Through hearing stories within a listening framework, educators can work to disrupt hierarchical power structures that hinder the ability to understand student experiences, develop alternative narratives that recognize the strengths of their students, and support agentic futures for them (Ravitch & Kannan, 2022). In storytelling “everyone is the expert of their own experience” (Ravitch & Carl, 2021) which is humanizing and eye-opening.

Creating intentional storytelling processes opens up spaces for students to share their funds of knowledge (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005). Ultimately, with greater understanding of the funds of knowledge around us, we can create more humanizing and culturally responsive approaches to teaching, learning, and inquiry. When listening to students’ stories about their lives and learning experiences, teachers are better positioned to “make teaching and learning relevant and responsive to the languages, literacies, and cultural practices of students across categories of difference and (in)equality” (Paris, 2012, p. 93). Alternatively, if we don’t take the time to listen to students’ stories, we will never be able to ground educational practice in the realities of their lives. Centering students is necessary to interrupt the inequitable status quo.

DANGEROUS THINGS

So what are the actual dangerous things?

Understanding Critical Race Theory is just that, a theory, evinces clarity that it’s being weaponized to retract progress. As a counternarrative I share a few actually dangerous things:

➢    Racist politicians, parents, and pundits angrily lit up by the promise of a multiracial democracy and entitled enough to go after it are dangerous things.

➢    Lawmakers, politicians, and boards that use inauthentic and dishonest talking points to invert the truth are dangerous things.

➢    Politicians and lawmakers who use truth against those who need it most are dangerous things.

Critical Race Theory is a portable structural racism detector, a way to identify and analyze patterns in systemic racism and structural discrimination. No wonder the most vocally racist are lashing out like scared bullies whose greedy hands were in the cookie jar with no accountability, suddenly caught red-handed with cookies stolen from others, threatened they’ll no longer be able to hoard as others starve. Instead of being contrite when caught, bullies always double and triple down with a vengeance. Hence, the hype in the media daily about Critical Race Theory, a theory that actually liberates ALL OF US since knowing and naming our truth sets us free.

I’ll end, for now, with the words of Audre Lorde in Sister, Outsider,

“Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

We must unite efforts, love and protect Critical Race Theory even more vocally, engage it as an inquiry, engage it in our research, stand up for and defend it in all of our spheres of influence, proactively teach about it as the framework of analysis and theory of collective liberation it is.

The piece is dedicated to my colleague and friend, Dr. Andrea Kane, who embodied the values of Critical Race Theory in her tenure as Superintendent.

 Note: The title is a takeoff on George Lakoff’s (1987) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind in which Lakoff asks: What do categories of language and thought reveal about the human mind? Photo credit for Audre Lorde: K. Kendall, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.

References

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black Feminist        critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 89(1), 139–167.

Delgado, R. & Stefancic, J. (2001). Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. NYU Press.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum.

González, N., Moll, L., & Amanti, C. (Eds.). (2005). Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities and Classrooms. Erlbaum.

Khalifa, M. (2018). Culturally Responsive School Leadership. Harvard Education Press.

Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. F. (2016). Toward a critical race theory of education. In Critical        Race Theory in Education (pp. 10-31). Routledge.

Lorde, A. (1988). A Burst of Light: Essays by Audre Lorde. Firebrand Books.

Lorde, A. (1984). Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press.

Pak, K. & Ravitch, S. M. (2021). (Eds.) Critical Leadership Praxis: Leading Educational and Social Change. Teachers College Press.

Paris, D. (2012). Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: A needed change in stance, terminology, and    practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93-97.

Ravitch S. M. & Carl, M. N. (2021). Qualitative Research: Bridging the Conceptual, Theoretical, and Methodological. (2nd Ed.). Sage Publications.

Ravitch, S. M. & Kannan, C. A. (2022). (Eds.). Flux Leadership: Real-time Inquiry for Humanizing

Educational Change. Teachers College Press.

Solórzano, D. G., & Yosso, T. J. (2002). Critical Race Methodology: Counter-storytelling as an analytical framework for education research. Qualitative Inquiry, 8(1), 23-44.