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By: Zachary Draves
Lately, there has been another political scare tactic designed at ginning up a portion of the electorate for political gain and that is the ongoing battle of the teaching of Critical Race Theory.
Orgininted by famed legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado to name a few and defined by the American Bar Association, CRT is a practice of interrogating the role of race and racism in society that emerged in the legal academy and spread to other fields of scholarship.
In other words, it is studying the law through the lens of race and racism and determining whether legislation and/or public policy result in any racial discrepancies.
According to the ABA, CRT follows these guiding principles:
- Recognition that race is not biologically real but is socially constructed and socially significant. It recognizes that science (as demonstrated in the Human Genome Project) refutes the idea of biological racial differences. According to scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, race is the product of social thought and is not connected to biological reality.
- Acknowledgment that racism is a normal feature of society and is embedded within systems and institutions, like the legal system, that replicates racial inequality. This dismisses the idea that racist incidents are aberrations but instead are manifestations of structural and systemic racism.
- Rejection of popular understandings about racism, such as arguments that confine racism to a few “bad apples.” CRT recognizes that racism is codified in law, embedded in structures, and woven into public policy. CRT rejects claims of meritocracy or “colorblindness.” CRT recognizes that it is the systemic nature of racism that bears primary responsibility for reproducing racial inequality.
- Recognition of the relevance of people’s everyday lives to scholarship. This includes embracing the lived experiences of people of color, including those preserved through
storytelling, and rejecting deficit-informed research that excludes the epistemologies of people of color.
It should be worth noting that this particular subject is generally taught in law school and in some graduate schools.
But some politicians, commentators, parents, and pseudo-scholars are under the impression that this complex legal theory has found its place in K-12 schools around the country and these groups are disrupting school board meetings calling on teachers to not teach something that they weren’t teaching to begin with.
Opponents of CRT claim that the teaching of this theory will automatically lump white people in the category of oppressors and black people into the category of oppressed and thereby furthering the divide between the races.
Some have even compared it to the teachings of the KKK which not only couldn’t be further from the truth but also reveals a lack of understanding of history that is categorically distributing and dangerous.
Nowhere in CRT does it teach any superiority or inferiority of a particular race rather than race being used as an analysis of the law.
Well, this battle found its way onto the campus of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
In July, the University Board of Regents, led specifically by Regent and current gubernatorial candidate Jim Pillen, issued a resolution calling for a ban on the teaching of CRT.
The resolution was supported by the likes of hard-core conservative Governor Pete Ricketts but not by the student body and much of the faculty.
Ultimately the resolution was defeated and academic freedom triumphed. A significant part of this victory came from the organization and mobilization of student-athletes.
Members of Nebraska’s Minority Student-Athlete Collective and Student-Athlete Advisory Committee joined forces with the newly formed United College Athlete Advocates to release a petition, signed by over 1300 student-athletes and supporters, opposing the resolution.
https://nebraska.tv/news/local/petition-drive-to-keep-crt-at-unl-sees-support-from-husker-athletes
Among those involved was Nebraska track runner Sadio Fenner whom I had the chance to talk to and get his thoughts and feelings.
(Courtesy: Husker Athletics)
What compelled you to take action against this resolution?
I think what really started was the fact that how much I and I know others have benefited from conversations from CRT and the questions and answers that come from it. It helps us to navigate the environment that we are in. So when I saw that they wanted to get rid of that I felt that they were doing a great disservice to a lot of people. So me and some other people around the campus who were passionate about this issue started the petition to force our discontent with this.
You said that you have taken classes on CRT?
Not exactly classes but much more on how it is integrated into the classroom. I grew up with the international baccalaureate program which has a lot of different viewpoints brought into the classroom as a way to explore all sides of every issue. Those same topics are brought into CRT and if it is not something that is taught then doing that you lose a lot of very valuable viewpoints.
What you have been taught, does it in any way resemble what is being talked about in certain circles and media outlets?
Not at all. I guess because big media outlets like to spin things on how they want it to be presented it has been hard to explain to a lot of people what CRT actually is in part because they come in with this presumption of whatever it is.
What do you hope going forward that the work you and are your fellow student-athletes will do?
The original hope was to bring awareness and clarification to what CRT is and how it can be beneficial to people on especially a college campus where this is an institution of learning, where you’re learning not just what your degree is in but also how to be a full citizen. This is a way to navigate the environment in which you are put in.
How can people support you and your fellow student-athletes?
I guess we are more or less trying to figure out how to navigate this throughout the course of the school year which can be challenging for student-athletes as we go back to competition. I think one of the biggest things that people can do is to have an open mind about a lot of things and not only buy into one news outlet or one side of the story. Try to be more well-rounded and understanding which can help people make a lot of decisions about whether or not they support something.
