The Attack on “Critical Race Theory” Deploys a Dangerous Fiction of Neutrality

In the summer of 2020, amid uprisings against racism and calls to defund the police, right-wing writer Christopher Rufo appeared on Fox News to sound the alarm about “critical race theory.”

Rufo framed the academic field as a conspiracy that aimed to use analyses of structural racism and white privilege to undermine the American republic. Critical race theory, he said, “pervaded every institution in the federal government” and “is now being weaponized against the American people.” The implication was that the movement against the police could not have sprung up as a response to a state that abandoned its people in a pandemic and continued to subject them to horrendous violence. Instead, Rufo offered an explanation that was more palatable to Fox News’s audience: Critical race theory had generated these protests, and it was responsible for what Fox News viewers would see as “violent” crime and wanton property destruction.

Watching his show that evening was then-President Donald Trump, who took swift action. Two days later, his budget chief worked toward canceling all governmental diversity trainings. In the fall, the federal government issued an executive order that aimed “to promote unity” and “to combat anti-American race and sex stereotyping.” Fifty-six years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal government worked to roll back what little effort it had put into ending both racism and sexism, all under the guise of combating “critical race theory.”

In actuality, critical race theory is a subgenre of legal studies that emerged in the 1970s and that plumbs the ways in which race and gender structure U.S. laws and policies, excluding some and granting rights to others. But Rufo, Trump and the right wing are not really focused on critiquing this academic field. They want, instead, to stir up a moral panic as a means of gaining further control over public institutions and of winning local and state elections. Attacking the idea of “critical race theory” — which, in the context of right-wing media, seems to mean whatever the critics want it to mean — is a means to an end.

“The goal,” Rufo tweeted recently, “is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” Or, as he later said, he aimed to turn “it into a salient political issue with a clear villain”: leftists, as well as Black Lives Matter, anti-fascists, and all the other specters the right claims endanger U.S. democracy. Many on the right decided to follow his lead. With all their talk of racism and sexism, Rufo and his ilk claimed, these critical race theorists undermined the Republic’s originary creed that “all men are created equal,” except, of course, enslaved people, women, Indigenous people, and many others.

Rufo’s “decodification” has been by and large successful. David Theo Goldberg, who has contributed to critical race theory, was mailed a document that described the field as “hateful fraud” that claims “you are only your race” and that descends from the thought of “such hate promoters as Marx” — but the attack on critical race theory has also come to target writers who cover race in other ways (beyond the critical race theory field), like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. It also counts among its targets diversity trainings, public school educators teaching about racism, and more. In short, critical race theory has come to stand in for any discussion of race that might imply that racism or sexism has continued in any form and that some people today benefit from either — a low bar if ever there was one.