Debating Ideas reflects the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarship, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It offers debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books. It is edited and managed by the International African Institute, hosted at SOAS University of London, the owners of the book series of the same name.
Everything changed in 2020. By early March 2020 it was clear to many who lived in places like New York City there was a mounting international health crisis. A new reality was swiftly, violently, and indiscriminately spanning the globe as this new year set in: Covid-19.
Aja, one of the co-authors of this piece published her first single-authored book, Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory (CRT), on May 29, 2020. Four days before the publication of Counterstory, George Floyd was murdered by Derrick Chauvin in Minneapolis. We agree with Victor Ray and David Theo Goldberg who each locate the genesis of the political attack on CRT in he sociopolitical responses to the police murder of George Floyd.
So much changed in 2020. Within a worldwide pandemic, a worldwide protest erupted in response to this murder.The Movement for Black Lives encompassed the summer of 2020, becoming a global protest united in coalition and solidarity. But as the racial rhetorics pendulum ever swings, the chorus of white-lash outcry erupted: "Blue Lives Matter!", "All Lives Matter!" This self-interested clamour reached its apex in a September 1, 2020, media appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight by Manhattan Institute media strategist Christopher Rufo.
Referencing the Obama administration's 2011 Executive Order 13583, Rufo insinuated this Democratic and first Black former president was at the root of an "occult ideology" in the form of mandated diversity and inclusion initiatives throughout the federal government. Rufo claimed these trainings were initiated to "root out conservative ideas and ultimately purge conservative employees." Playing the long game, Rufo, as a mouthpiece and representative of conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, called on conservatives to "wake up" - which is ironic conceptually, considering the "war on woke" emanated from these same entities -- to "an existential threat to the United States." Rufo described DEI trainings (that he repeatedly mischaracterized as CRT) as "weaponized against core traditional American values." In an urgent call to action, Rufo appealed directly to President Trump, saying, "I'd like to make it explicit: the President and the White House, it's within their authority and power to immediately issue an executive order abolishing critical race theory trainings from the federal government and I call on the President to immediately issue this executive order and stamp out this destructive, divisive pseudo-scientific ideology at its root."
According to former White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, Rufo was then invited to the White House to develop what would become Executive Order 13950 that President Trump signed into effect on September 22, 2020. Meadows indicates that the timeline leading to the Order being signed was vastly accelerated beyond normal processes, noting that "in most White Houses, this kind of thing would have taken months, if not years, to draft and enact."[1] This (now rescinded) "Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping" prefigured what later became model legislation from various conservative think tanks, saying:
'[M]any people are pushing a different vision of America that is grounded in hierarchies based on collective social and political identities rather than in the inherent and equal dignity of every person as an individual.
This ideology is rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country; that some people, simply on account of their race or sex, are oppressors; and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans ...'
Placing particular focus on education, the order continues,
'[T]his malign ideology is now migrating from the fringes of American society and threatens to infect core institutions of our country.'
The after-effects of this executive order shined a national spotlight on and in many ways placed targets on those of us who are identifiable "CRT culprits" and "indoctrinators" within educational institutions because we, the teachers, are the ones who stand accused of (also supposedly) infecting young minds and teaching Americans to hate America.
According to the UCLA CRT Forward tracking project, since Trump's September 2020 executive order (to the time of this writing, February 2025), "a total of 249 local, state, and federal government entities across the United States have introduced 870 anti-Critical Race Theory bills, resolutions, executive orders, opinion letters, statements, and other measures." Many of these efforts were based on model legislation provided by conservative think tanks. Interestingly, the right- and left-wing media, both sides, were inaccurate and misinformed about the origins and realities of CRT. The right was egregiously incorrect in their assertion that CRT is rooted in Marxist ideology, originating in the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Far from being the product of European ideas, CRT's origins are found in the deeply American experiences of people of colour in the United States. Most scholars locate the movement's foundations to US law schools such as Harvard, Yale, and Berkeley where students throughout the 1970s and 1980s led activist movements that eventually developed into what is now known as CRT.
Some leftist media and politicians offered talking points that were no more accurate. CRT was not and has not ever remained confined behind the ivy walls of these elite law schools.
Near the beginning of 2023, the Texas state legislature presented several bills aimed at Texas state public institutions of higher education - bills that mimicked and echoed many of the other anti-DEI and anti-CRT bills already spreading like wildfire throughout the USA. While previous efforts had targeted K-12 education, higher education was now in the legislative crosshairs. Christopher Rufo remained a central spokesperson for the effort alongside others, including longtime Black apologists Ben Carson and Carol Swain. In states like Florida and Texas, limits on undergraduate- and graduate-level classroom content were now paired with provisions for denying/stripping tenure or outright dismissing university professors like ourselves.
This Texas legislation, like the Rufo-inspired Trump executive order on which it built, provided model examples of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's analysis of abstract liberalism. According to Bonilla-Silva, abstract liberalism "involves using ideas associated with political liberalism (e.g. 'equal opportunity,' the idea that force should not be used to achieve social policy) and economic liberalism (e.g. choice, individualism) in an abstract manner to explain racial matters." Emphasizing (as abstractions) the seemingly innocuous liberal concepts of individualism and merit, and with an overriding concern for protecting politically conservative viewpoints, this legislation made it so professors would be forbidden "to compel a student enrolled at the institution to adopt a belief that any race, sex, or ethnicity or social, political, or religious belief is inherently superior to any other race, sex, ethnicity, or belief."
In its attempt to combat other forms of DEI-related instruction, another Texas bill forbade "making part of a course inculcation in the concept" that "an individual, by virtue of the individual's race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously," or that the concept of "meritocracy [is] racist or sexist." In an attempted blow to various ethnic studies curricula, including the high-profile 1619 Project along with the foundations of Critical Race Theory - and, we would argue, any notion of accurate historical representation - the bill further forbade teaching that "with respect to their relationship to American values, slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality."
In March 2021, Rufo tweeted: "We have successfully frozen their brand - 'critical race theory' - into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category." Rufo's tried-and-true market branding exercise had been succeeding in constructing CRT as a monster, a villain, the boogeyman waiting for your children at school. It was a manufactured socio-political crisis intended to stir up the masses, create havoc and confusion, and promote intentionally deceptive definitions, terms and concepts. Recent opponents of CRT want the movement reduced to a few statements and commitments, a collection of dry bones or simple equations that can be picked apart or rearranged. They are deploying our own academic concepts against us and further weaponizing them towards the public to instill fear and disinformation.
We are living in a momentous time. As the global order slips toward authoritarianism, racial retrenchment is on the rise.Global economic shifts and growing wealth disparities are combining with the climate crisis to create renewed conditions for the exploitation of labour and the unjust distribution of resources. Laws and policies are being altered, modified and reinterpreted to benefit those classes long invested in building a world that suits their interests. The faces at the bottom of the well, those communities consigned to poverty and degradation, are at ever greater risk of racialized dehumanization and violence.
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It is no mistake that CRT - one of the most incisive and forward-thinking tools for critical inquiry and societal interpretation developed in the United States - is now coming under attack. As Derrick Bell observed in 1995, "At a time of crisis, critics serve as reminders that we are being heard, if not always appreciated." The power of CRT is in stories -that humanize data, that communicate truths. Although CRT has recently again come under attack, even those of us committed to its tenets and frameworks should not forget that the call is not primarily to defend CRT. Good tools are worth defending because of the good they can do for the sake of the world. When it comes to the storytelling heart of CRT, the point is to effectively humanize data to promote justice and the flourishing of human communities.
Footnotes
[1] Mark Meadows, The Chief's Chief (St. Petersburg: All Seasons Press, 2021), 126-127. Meadows's reporting of White House comprehension of CRT is revealing. Saying it "sounded like a precise reversal of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream for the United States," Meadows reported that President Trump "reacted with horror," saying "Teaching our military - let alone kids - that the color of your skin is somehow responsible for your actions is political correctness bullshit" (125).
Aja Y. Martinez is Associate Professor of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is author of the award-winning Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory and co-author, with Robert O. Smith, of The Origins of Critical Race Theory: The People and Ideas That Formed a Movement. Robert O. Smith is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Texas and Enrolled Citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. He is the author of More Desired than Our Own Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism and co-author, with Aja Y. Martinez, of The Origins of Critical Race Theory: The People and Ideas That Formed a Movement.
