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Shelly Schreter – Critical Race Theory Explained
[This is an excerpt from a long interview/podcast of Ezra Klein in the NY Times (July 9, 2021) speaking to Eve Ewing, an amazing person who is a professor of sociology at the U. of Chicago, a published poet, the author of children’s books and episodes of various characters in Marvel Comics, and a serious black American public intellectual. I pasted it in here in an attempt to better understand critical race theory, rather than just dismissing it as the new politically correct dogma with which to browbeat white Americans and to claim thereby all manner of reparations and compensations, at the expense (for example) of Asian and Jewish Americans. I emphasized certain passages in Bold Type.
So much of this is about perspective, cultural struggle, and who gets to determine the main lines of the American self-understanding – the American narrative – and about whose version is to be believed. Getting the balance right is not just an abstract exercise, and the denial or concealment of the ugliness of so much of American history cannot be perpetuated. But having sharpened the focus, and clarified the perspective, what do you do then?
Ewing says clearly at the end that you can’t just negate, you also have to offer some meaningful vision for a better, remediated future. Working out the details of what that means is the task ahead. But, says Ewing, you can’t address that credibly unless you contend with the comforting myths of the past. For your consideration,
Shelly]
EZRA KLEIN: So the book is part of this effort that we talked about earlier, and that you tagged on critical race theory, to listen to voices that don’t always get listened to. And then I went, and I was watching a critical race theory explainer you did on Instagram. I think a lot of the things that critical race theory is part of and thinks about we are not really arguing about in the public debate.
But the one that we are is the idea that other voices and forms of knowing and other communities should be taken seriously. And their historical experience is treated as valid knowledge that policy should be built off of, and power should be changed because of.
And so I’d like hear you talk a bit about that, because it’s easy to hear that as simply a way of doing inquiry into a question, but you’re attaching it to this much broader debate that I don’t think people usually think of it as. But changing who gets listened to really does change policy and really does change power.
So how is that part of critical race theory? And how do you see the way that that fight is playing out?
EVE EWING: Sure. I want to clarify that, in my opinion as someone who has followed this debate publicly with much consternation, I find that roughly 80 to 95 percent of what people are debating in public right now has virtually nothing to do with critical race theory in my personal opinion.
EZRA KLEIN: I think that’s just true. it’s just like a true fact.
EVE EWING: It is. Yeah. I’m being roughshod with my percentages here, but for those who might be interested, I’ll just do a real quick, short background.
So critical race theory is a theoretical construct and a way of doing research and inquiry that is now widely used in many fields, but that originates in critical legal studies. And people like Mari Matsuda, Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris and many others, that they developed as a framework because they, as legal scholars, became frustrated with the way that they were trained to think about and analyze the law and the impacts of the law always presumed the objective neutrality of the American legal system.
And that it provided very few ways to understand the fact that there are things like racism, discrimination and bias that are baked into the foundations of American society. And that it becomes very cumbersome to have to prove that over and over in a way that is counterproductive.
And so critical race theory offers us a framework to depart from that presupposition rather than reframing it. I think here of the comedian W. Kamau Bell, who has this skit where he talks about how annoying it is when somebody is like, how do you know it was racism? And you’re like oh, this thing happened to me, and it was so racist.
And he’s like, how do you know it was racism? And he’s like, what if I asked you every time you told me you had a pizza how’d you know it was pizza? And you’re like well, you know I’ve had pizza a lot. I know it smells a certain way, and it tastes a certain way. And how do you know how it wasn’t focaccia? How do you know it wasn’t a flatbread? I just know what pizza is.
And so, when you live as a person of color, as a person who has experienced — I got called the n-word for the first time when I was six. So there are so many ways in which racism and I are old, old buddies. To be asked to prove it over and over, it makes you feel like you’re living in an alternate reality.
And so these scholars gave us this profound gift, outlining for us some basic understandings about the way our country has always worked and allowing that to be a point of departure for deeper analysis. And so for me, and I think for many graduate students, for many scholars, the first time I encountered CRT — and I was assigned these articles to read at the graduate level, not at the fourth grade. Not at the master’s level. Not for either of my two first master’s degrees, but at the doctoral level was the first time I encountered critical race theory.
But when I first encountered critical race theory, it was like a light opening up in the sky because it confirmed so many things that I always understood intuitively. And that every person of color in the academy that I knew also understood, but that was so often not given language.
And so some of my closest friends in academia — I had a close friend who’s Japanese-American who went to graduate school with me. And her entire family was interned during World War Two. They were incarcerated.
I think about what it means to ask a person like that to prove that America has not always fundamentally been a good and just place, and that the legal system does not work equally for everybody. And for me, for classmates like that, to see it written by these esteemed, incredibly brilliant scholars, that the things our parents lived through, the things our grandparents lived through, the things that we lived through are a valid source of knowing? There are no words that I can give to how meaningful that was.
And I think that part of why, for some scholars, this attack has been so surprising and so hurtful in a weird way is because it’s in the academy, which is still, by and large so incredibly elitist, racially, class-wise, gender-wise in many subdisciplines. That it’s one school of thought that gives us language for saying the things my grandma told me count. That those things are real.
And for me, and for many scholars, those things are the only reason we ever went into this field anyway. I came into this work because I had deep levels of inquiry, and also deep levels of pain and hurt, and a desire to understand a world that inflicted pain and hurt on people that I love and care about. And to understand the patterns, to understand the why, to understand the how do we fix it questions. And to have them be illuminated.
And I think that for so many of us, critical race theory has offered that. But also that I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have those questions about lived experience.
EZRA KLEIN: This is why, though, I appreciate the account of this that you give, and let me see if I can say this in a way that’s not going to make people too mad.
EVE EWING: Let’s do it, Ezra. All is already lost. [LAUGHTER]
EZRA KLEIN: To make them all mad?
I’ve read a lot of the explainers in the past couple weeks, and I’m an explainer journalist. That’s my background. Of what critical race theory really is. And critical race theory is often very technical. It’s a very specific, very built-out academic theory and way of apprehending the world.
And as you said at the beginning of this, it’s also not what is being argued about politically. The right has created a symbolic container that they’re calling critical race theory, and the people who have come up with this have very much said it explicitly. Other things weren’t working. You don’t want to say your argument’s social justice because who’s against social justice? Because you’re arguing against anti-racism because you don’t want to be a racist. They found critical race theory, which sounds elitist, sounds scary to people, at least to some people and went with that.
But so then you get into this like countermove, which is well, no. If you really read the essential readings in critical race theory, what you will come to learn about the structure of the legal system in America is —
EVE EWING: Right, six months later, when you’re done with all the reading… [LAUGHTER]
EZRA KLEIN: Yeah, exactly. And then you’ve proved something they weren’t even arguing about really, which is that they’re wrong about what critical race theory is. And this goes back to I think to our whole conversation, but what you said. The first time I listened to your explainer, I was like wait, that’s — that doesn’t get it. And I was like no, you’re exactly right that — to W. Kamau Bell’s thing.
At some point, you have to decide who you’re going to believe if you have two people arguing over whether or not it’s focaccia, flatbread or pizza. And critical race theory says, and some of your work says, listen to the people who have been on the sharp, pointy edge of the stick of racism.
And a lot of more traditional theories say no, you have to keep reproving. We should assume always it’s colorblind.
EVE EWING: Or, sorry, or even worse, those people know the least because they are so biased. Their head is not clear.
EZRA KLEIN: And that’s what you’re doing in a lot of your work, but also in this argument — I do think this is the real argument over critical race theory — which is simply, who should be believed? And there’s a sense that people on the right have, I think it is a true sense, that the question of who should be believed in their account of America is changing.
That’s the fight over the 1619 Project. That’s the fight over a lot of this stuff, and it’s small versions of the fight, too. The fights over schools in Chicago also have a sense of who should be believed. And critical race theory, it seems to me, and a lot of just American politics in general, is about who do we believe? Whose knowledge and experience do we count as valid?
EVE EWING: I think that that sums it up so, so well, and that’s so true. And for me, one of the issues is that there’s a way in which we get hung up at that level, where we’re never allowed to proceed past that level of, who is a credible informer? And who is not?
And so therefore, we never even get to the evidentiary level. And so when I say something like America, the United States as we know it, has a deep and entrenched history as a racist nation state, I’m not just saying that because I felt like it, or I saw it on a sticker. That is something that I came to believe through my own, number one, experiences in the world, but also, as I came to learn about forms of racism that did not affect me in my communities, personally, but that I saw their basic impact across the trajectory of what we come to take for granted.
So when you learn about something like Japanese incarceration, when you learn about the genocide of indigenous peoples, you start to ask a lot of questions about the premise of the society in which we live. And I think that you’re right that some of this is a question of whose country is it? And who is believable? And who is a credible informer?
But also that it’s deeply painful for people to admit that it may be that the things they cherish and the things they hold dear about our society are unavoidably inflected with hurt and pain. And I think that there’s a way in which, in our personal lives, in our political lives, we just become stronger, healthier, happier people when we are able to account for the flaws of those whom we love.
And to paraphrase him badly, Baldwin said, I critique America because I love America. And I think that all of us, in our relationships, in ourselves, have things that we recognize as imperfect, and we learn how to account for, be honest about, and reckon with those flaws and, where necessary, make repair.
And certainly, the furor around the 1619 Project, which I was very honored to participate in, is also just really stunning and odd because some of what is being debated are just objective facts. That certain things happened in certain years to certain people, and we can never really get to that point if we’re always shadowboxing with, critical race theory teaches white kids to be sad and to hate themselves.
And it’s just such a masterful and disturbing intentional misuse, and misreading, and misrepresentation.
EZRA KLEIN: Two things caught my ear. One is the point you made about after not being able to get past the debate over the debate. You just get mired in this, like, can we even have the conversation?
But then in the way truth is constructed, and this strikes me as maybe a bridge to the other side of your work. We’ve really been talking here about “Ghosts in the Schoolyard,” and sociology, and the work you do on the way things are or trying to describe some texture of the way things are.
And then you have this other side, which is the way they aren’t but maybe ought to be. You gave it an “is / ought” distinction earlier, I think. And that’s true in your comics, your poetry, a lot of it is Afrofuturism You did a great conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates, and you talked about igniting imagination.
So can you tell me about that side of it? The side of it where, at the beginning of your book of poetry, you say everything in here is absolutely true? And of course, a lot in there is speculative fiction and alternative reality. So how do you think about that relationship with the truth of what could be?
EVE EWING: What a great question. I love talking about Afrofuturism.
So I think that there is a couple of things. One, I am very privileged in that I came of age, and continue to constantly come of age, and learn, and grow in a community with some really incredible political organizers. Chicago is a city that has a lot of those, and I’ve been really honored to learn from those folks for many years.
And one of the things that I learned over and over is that you cannot have any type of political movement that only offers a rebuttal to what is, without ever looking forward to what could be. And I’ve heard you in some of your other conversations about — abolition is one of the places where I think this is especially important.
How do we have political futures that we can configure that are not only about negation, but that are about construction and dreaming? And I think of how dreaming, and imagination, and possibility are very much key words for the work I want to do. Partially because I think that it is a political necessity that otherwise, when the moment comes, and you find yourself having won whatever fights you wanted to win, that you are not prepared to build the world that you want.
To quote Gwendolyn Brooks again, there’s a poem in which she says, “Live not for the battles won. Live in the along.” And I think that along the way, when we try to embody the politics of possibility, and to live into what we imagine as being possible, and what we want for the future, we’re practicing. We’re putting into place the habits, the relationships and the things that we need to ultimately live the world that we want.
