WHEN BIOLOGY PROFESSOR Bret Weinstein was threatened and harassed at Evergreen State College for his opinions about diversity and inclusion on campus, he felt like he was living in some sort of dystopian nightmare. “The chief of our college police department told me she could not protect me on campus,” Weinstein wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “Protestors were searching cars for an unspecified individual—likely me—and her officers had been told to stand down, against her judgment, by the college president.”
The debacle started when Professor Weinstein questioned changes to the campus’ planned “Day of Absence.” Traditionally, the Day of Absence, based on the play of the same name, had been a day when students and professors of color would stay home to show what the campus would look like without their contributions to the school. However, in 2017, the purpose of the day was flipped on its head. It was decided that all white professors and students should stay home as a show of remorse and restitution to the black and minority student body and faculty.
Previously, participation had been voluntary. But that year there was a show of force. Organizers explained that anyone unwilling to leave campus for the day was exacerbating the systemic racism they believed was present in every single white person on campus.
This concerned Weinstein, who didn’t think it was right to ask students and faculty to leave campus for a day because of their skin color.
In a letter to his colleagues, Weinstein voiced his concerns:
There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and underappreciated roles (the theme of the Douglas Turner Ward play Day of Absence, as well as the recent Women’s Day walkout), and a group encouraging another group to go away. The first is a forceful call to consciousness which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.
Declaring his intent to protest the event, he wrote, “I will be on campus on the Day of Absence. I would encourage others to put phenotype aside and reject this new formulation, whether they have ‘registered’ for it or not. On a college campus, one’s right to speak—or to be—must never be based on skin color.”
Weinstein was quickly labeled a racist and the student body mobilized against him in a militant, frightening way.
Video footage captured on smartphones shows Weinstein being surrounded and cornered outside his classroom by Evergreen students. They refused to listen to him, shouting him down every time he tried to speak and drowning him out with a group chant: “Hey-hey, ho-ho, these racist teachers have got to go.”
The students did not stop with Weinstein. The Day of Absence incident sparked a larger movement on campus that reached a boiling point when students hijacked a faculty meeting, held professors and administrators hostage in a room, and issued a list of demands. Those demands included that Evergreen create an Equity Center, give mandatory “anti-oppression” trainings to all staff, and suspend Weinstein without pay. Students barricaded the building and formed a human wall outside to prevent police officers from entering. When Evergreen President George Bridges told protestors he had to use the restroom, they insisted that two protestors escort him.
Meanwhile, students who dared defend Weinstein were called racist, threatened, and chased off campus.
What happened at Evergreen in 2017 was unfortunately a portent of what’s happening now: Across the country, the debate around race and discrimination has grown toxic. It has turned college students against professors, employees against employers, and school boards against parents. On one side are the growing number of activists who have become convinced that race-blind policies perpetuate systemic racism and who are pushing instead for policies, laws, and attitudes that categorize individuals by race. On the other side are people like Bret Weinstein, who recently told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that the law should be colorblind. “When you walk into a courtroom, your race cannot matter,” he said. “The law has to be indifferent to these things. And our colleges need to be indifferent to these things as well, like all of the structures that make civilization function. But the trend is going rapidly in the opposite direction, putting race as the most important thing about you. It’s absolutely frightening. It’s very short-sighted and it will result in a catastrophe.”
While there are many reasons for this concerning trend, one contributor is the controversial academic framework known as critical race theory. But while critical race theory has become a powerful academic and philosophical movement in recent years, many laws, policies, and actions have been incorrectly lumped under the critical race theory label, which confuses the debate and has turned the discussion more political. The only way to effectively fight for equality before the law is to know what critical race theory is and isn’t, and know the difference between true equality and equity.
What is critical race theory?
According to The New York Times, “Critical race theorists reject the philosophy of ‘colorblindness.’ They acknowledge the stark racial disparities that have persisted in the United States despite decades of civil rights reforms, and they raise structural questions about how racist hierarchies are enforced, even among people with good intentions.”
In the past couple of years, media and governments alike have made race the focal point of reporting and policy discussions. But critical race theory has driven academic and philosophical debates in universities for several decades.
Critical race theory was born out of an earlier movement called critical theory.
On its website, the University of California, Berkeley explains that critical theory “is often associated with the Frankfurt School, a group of intellectuals who, starting in the 1920s, developed critiques of modern capitalist society, fascism, and the new global dispensations that followed in the aftermath of World War II; in doing so, the Frankfurt School constructed modes of social theory distinct from established forms of philosophy.” Then, in the 1980s, “a group of historians and scholars shifted the emphasis of critical theory to race rather than class.”
James Lindsay is co-author of the bestselling book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody. In an interview with Pacific Legal Foundation, he explained that critical race theory “proceeds from a number of assumptions: that racism is the fundamental organizing principle of society and that it was created by white people to be imposed upon people of color so that they could disenfranchise minorities and control them through a kind of soft power.”
Derrick Bell, a professor at Harvard Law, could be described as the father of critical race theory. Bell didn’t believe that the hard-won victories of the civil rights movement—chief among them, equality under the law—had sufficiently helped black Americans. In his 2004 book, Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform, Bell writes, “Success for the black person requires effective functioning achieved with the knowledge that his or her work will not be recognized or rewarded to the same degree as a white person doing the same thing.”
“Professor Bell had a very pessimistic view of what was going on in post-civil rights America,” Lindsay explained.
Bell wanted minority communities to recognize their constant oppression by white people in power who, he argued, have always and will always exploit minorities—even if they are unaware that they are doing so.
He set the stage for critical race theory, passing the torch to his law student Kimberlé Crenshaw, who helped the movement progress.
Crenshaw believed that oppressive social systems could never be remedied without explicitly acknowledging race in our laws and society. As she argued in the magazine The Baffler, “It’s important to fasten onto this point clearly: colorblindness not only undermines law and social policy that rely on race-conscious analysis, but also soothes anxiety about the stubborn endurance of the structures of white dominance.”
Critical race theory posits that working toward a “post-racial” society where race is no longer a determining factor of a person’s life is an unachievable goal. As Crenshaw explains: “The term [post-racial] worked both to de-historicize race in American society and, perversely enough, to reframe the idea of racism as something that was very much the opposite of the lived experience of race in America. Under this inside-out account of our racial history, a post-racial America was, by definition, a racially egalitarian America, no longer measured by forward-looking assessments of how far we have come, but by congratulatory declarations that we have arrived.”
Christopher Rufo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, argued in The Wall Street Journal that “critical race theory isn’t an exercise in promoting racial sensitivity or understanding history. It’s a radical ideology that seeks to use race as a means of moral, social and political revolution. The left-leaning media has sought to portray it as a ‘lens’ for examining the history of racism in the U.S., but this soft framing obscures the nature of the theory, which maintains that America is an irredeemably racist nation and that the constitutional principles of freedom and equality are mere ‘camouflages,’ in the words of scholar William F. Tate IV, for white supremacy.”
The rise of race-focused policies
In the past five to 10 years, the debate around the best ways to fight (and eventually end) discrimination has shifted away from race-blind, non-discriminatory laws and policies toward race-focused policies.
Robin DiAngelo, author of the book White Fragility, has said many times that the question we need to ask ourselves is not, is racism occurring? But rather, how is racism manifesting itself in any and every situation?
DiAngelo believes that white people can combat racism only by acknowledging and confronting their privilege and inherent racism. Even then, white people cannot fully be removed of guilt, because the privilege can never fully be erased. For activists like DiAngelo, your identity is reduced to your race, and nothing else matters—a sentiment we can see in the debacle at Evergreen.
But many of these ideas aren’t isolated to college campuses. All across the country, public and private K-12 schools are implementing more race-focused policies when it comes to school admissions and curricula.
Pacific Legal Foundation is currently representing Coalition for TJ, a group of students, alumni, parents, and community members who are challenging the new admissions policy at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ).
TJ is a Governor’s School, similar to a charter school and known for its rigorous and advanced curriculum that pushes students to be their best. Ranked the top high school in the country, TJ’s admissions test ensures that the students admitted are capable of handling the course load.
In 2020, the Fairfax County School Board voted to change the school’s admissions process from a race-neutral admissions test that granted automatic admission to those who passed, to a “holistic” approach that considered students’ elementary/middle school, neighborhood, and family income level, among other factors. While the school board sold the plan as a way to increase diversity in the already-diverse school, that meant ensuring that fewer Asian and more black and Hispanic students were admitted.
Coalition for TJ is suing on the grounds that the new policies are a violation of the constitutional guarantee of equality before the law.
The Fairfax County School Board has not tried to hide the anti-Asian intentions of the policy change. Superintendent Scott Brabrand even stated publicly that Asian-Americans were “over-represented” at TJ, and the school’s own principal repeatedly complained that TJ’s majority Asian-American student demographics weren’t like the rest of the school district.
Since the new admissions standards went into effect, the Asian-American student body has decreased by about 20%.
Or take Hartford, Connecticut, where a racial quota was implemented to engineer racial integration in public magnet schools. To make sure these schools were “properly” integrated, the state mandated that each school had to enroll a minimum of 25% white students. The result was a cap of 75% black and Hispanic students.
Because the community where these magnet schools were located was predominantly black, the schools had a hard time fulfilling their quota for white students. Rather than fill the empty seats with black and Hispanic children, the schools were required to turn away deserving black and Hispanic children, lest their enrollment upset the 25% mandate.
One black Hartford student had been at the top of the waitlist three times, but because of the new quota rules, he was never admitted to one of these life-changing schools.
As for Bret Weinstein, the mob did not stop coming for him. The situation at Evergreen eventually became untenable: Police called Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying, who also taught at the school, and told them their safety was in jeopardy—not only on campus, but at their home as well.
Fearing for their well-being, the couple resigned from their posts and sued the school for its failure to protect its faculty. Ultimately, Evergreen agreed to pay the couple about $500,000 each in addition to $50,000 of their legal fees.
But the pair had to leave the jobs they loved.
Individuals matter
The rallying cry of the civil rights movement is that every person in America should have an equal opportunity to learn, work, prosper, and live how they choose, regardless of the color of their skin. While that dream has not yet been perfectly realized, we must acknowledge the incredible progress that has been made in the past 10, 50, and 100 years.
Acknowledging progress does not mean surrendering to the status quo, and admitting that discrimination still exists does not mean ignoring the promise of the American dream. As a country, we have committed to atoning for the sins of the past by elevating everyone toward a better future. We should fulfill that commitment by ensuring no one is treated differently—or given any less opportunity—because of their race.