Would the Founding Fathers support critical race theory?

Would the Founding Fathers support critical race theory?

Washington Post

By Alvin B. Tillery, Jr.

June 30, 2021 at 8:00 p.m. GMT+9

Studying their writings — and other canonical documents in U.S. history — reveals how deeply racism is built into the nation’s structure

Signs opposing critical race theory line the entrance to the Loudoun County Public Schools Board headquarters, in Ashburn, Va., on June 22. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)

On June 22, a group of mostly White, conservative parents disrupted a school board meeting in Loudoun County, Va., one of the most affluent communities in the nation, as they protested the teaching of critical race theory in the county’s public schools and the use of transgender students’ preferred pronouns. Despite the school board chair’s insistence that “critical race theory is not being taught in our schools, period,” the meeting turned so raucous that two men were arrested for violent behavior.

The Loudon incident is just the latest flash point in a national conflict ginned up by right-wing media and Republican politicians over whether public institutions should teach about the United States’ dark history of racial inequality and/or about concepts of diversity, equity and inclusion. As president, Donald Trump opened this latest chapter of the culture war when he issued an executive order barring any organization that contracts with the federal government from offering diversity, equity and inclusion training that focuses on systemic racism. Although a federal judge quickly placed an injunction on Trump’s ban and President Biden immediately rescinded the order when he took office, Republican politicians have continued to target diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in America’s public schools under the guise of banning what they mislabel “critical race theory.”

Over the past several weeks, Republican-controlled legislatures in states such as Texas, Florida and Oklahoma have passed bills banning the teaching of critical race theory in their K-12 educational systems; several other states are debating similar measures.

What’s wrong with this debate?

Story continues below advertisement

Here’s what’s most interesting about these attacks on what’s called “critical race theory”: The attackers reveal how much ignorance they have about U.S. history.

As they proscribe the teaching of critical race theory, several of these bills instead prescribe teaching the writings of the Founding Fathers, alongside other canonical White, male political philosophers. The idea is that these authors’ writings will be an antidote to the purported dangers children face if they discuss, say, “systemic racism.” For instance, Texas’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a ban requiring that students read “the writings of the Founding Fathers of the United States,” excerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” and the Lincoln-Douglass Debates.

Had the sponsors of these laws taken the time to read either critical race theory scholars or the White male authors they are now mandating, they would see a fatal flaw in their “reform” efforts. Many of the authors conservatives want students to read actually agree with critical race theory’s core argument: Systemic racism is a cornerstone of the U.S. republic.

Story continues below advertisement

Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote in his 1789 book “Notes on the State of Virginia” that Blacks were a “distinct and inferior species” when compared with Whites. One year later, Jefferson joined the other Founding Fathers in supporting the Naturalization Act of 1790, which made citizenship in the United States available only to “free, white persons.” During the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that “If [he] had all the powers in the world, he would gladly send every Black person in America back to Africa” because he did not believe the two races could live together in the United States. In fact, Lincoln pursued “repatriating” Black Americans to Africa in his plans to bring the South back into the Union.

Critical race theorists point to these racist ideas and the policy positions that flowed from them as evidence that systemic racism against people of color is baked deeply into the United States’ construction.

Alexis de Tocqueville was the first critical race theorist

Story continues below advertisement

Conservatives have spent two generations lionizing Tocqueville for his insights into U.S. democracy. This canonical thinker anticipated the arguments of critical race theory scholars such as Derrick Bell and Richard Delgado. As I’ve argued, the main tenets of critical race theory are all part of Tocqueville’s analysis of the limits of American democracy. For instance, Tocqueville, like the critical race theorists, believed that whiteness was a privileged identity in the United States, where laws imbued Whites with a “sense of superiority.” He also shared Bell’s belief that systemic racism would be a permanent feature of U.S. society. Indeed, Tocqueville proclaimed that Black Americans would never “live on a footing of equality” in the United States because of Whites’ “tenacious prejudices” against them. Writing in the early 1830s, Tocqueville predicted that the United States’ systemic inequalities would boil over into a race war.

Where should we go from here?

To be sure, U.S. public schools could easily assign all these texts and pick selections that avoid these writers’ ideas about how race structured American society. If the Republican campaign to ban critical race theory in U.S. schools is really a debate over pedagogy, then putting these texts in proper historical context could lead teaching in a new direction.

Story continues below advertisement

However, if the Republican war on critical race theory is more about arousing anger among base voters than about having a principled debate over U.S. history, the politicians and pundits who are driving this are unlikely to change their behavior. Those of us educated in this history may wish to meet such a campaign by pointing out the facts about where and how systemic racism is woven into the United States’ charter documents, legal history and founders’ writings, where it continues to structure American society.

In a statement before Congress last week, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defended academic freedom and reading critical race theory at the U.S. Military Academy. A deep engagement with the real history of systemic racism in the United States can be an important tool in preventing Tocqueville’s prediction of a race war in the United States from coming true.

Alvin B. Tillery, Jr. (@AlvinBTilleryJr), a scholar of race relations and the history of American political thought, is director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy and associate professor of political science at Northwestern University.