Uncritical Race Theory
Haymarket Books
In the cacophony of today’s political discourse, debates about critical race theory (CRT) are ubiquitous, but what’s not discussed, and what I believe must be studied, is uncritical race theory. “Uncritical race theory” is the term I am developing here to define systems of belief that unquestioningly subscribe to prevailing views on race that reinforce existing racial power relations. Uncritical race theory denies that racism exists at all, or maintains that racism primarily victimizes white people, or rejects any systemic or institutional analysis in favor of an interpersonal explanation that understands racism as only sporadic and merely the product of individual bias.
Uncritical race theorists position themselves as natural and objective, unencumbered by ideology or a theory of race when in fact they have a highly developed theory of race, even if they are unaware of the origins or the full dimensions of this theory. To be clear, uncritical race theorists would never refer to themselves as such because it would divulge that their opposition to CRT (and every other antiracist framework) is not anchored by research and historical inquiry, but rather the result of unsubstantiated and unmoored theories that sink under the most cursory of examinations. When educators analyze race in their lessons, uncritical race theorists accuse them of politicizing the curriculum—a claim that approaches reason only if you believe that teaching children uncritical acceptance of the current racist structures and institutions is not political.
It’s important to understand that uncritical race theory is used by liberals and conservatives, who both often advance narratives of color blindness, or postracialism, in their meager attempt to explain how race functions in
society. In this way, the term is useful for pointing out the overlap between liberal and conservative ideas when they both dismiss structural racism as a salient axis of power in our society. This overlap between liberal and conservative views on race became pronounced in the wake of Barack Obama’s election as President.
With liberal politicians and media often legitimizing the color-blind approaches to race, conservatives have seized on it as their primary strategy for banning conversations about structural racism in the schools. One of the ways they attempt to bolster their color-blind attack on CRT is to misuse the words of Martin Luther King Jr.—as if King dreamed of a day when little Black boys and girls could hold hands with little white boys and girls on their way to a school that would outlaw their ability to learn about the civil rights movement, Black history, and the legacy of structural racism. U.S. Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, for example, tweeted, “Critical Race Theory goes against everything Martin Luther King Jr. taught us—to not judge others by the color of their skin.”
The cynical irony of uncritical race theorists who use the words of King to promote bills to restrict teaching about racism is that if King were alive today, they would spare no invective as they charged him with being one of the most subversive of the critical race theorists. Imagine for a moment the uproar from uncritical race theorists that would ensue if King were alive today and students assembled in the auditorium to hear him talk about the “unspeakable horrors of police brutality,” as he put it in his “I Have a Dream” speech. In many states and school districts today, a teacher quoting this section of King’s speech and explaining what those horrors were risks being punished for politicizing the classroom. Or consider King’s pronouncement in 1967 that “the doctrine of white supremacy was embedded in every textbook and preached in practically every pulpit” and was entrenched as “a structural part of the culture.” King’s radical understanding of structural racism and white supremacy put him in direct confrontation with the uncritical race theorists of his time, even if they attempt to co-opt his message today.
Antiracist analytic traditions—such as CRT, ethnic studies, cultural studies, or Black studies—are very clear about what race is: a socially constructed categorizing system of humans, with no basis in biology, reflecting the prevailing power relations dating to the transatlantic slave trade, which was used to justify the enslavement of African people and divide and conquer the laboring class of people from all origins. The decision by European colonizers in the Americas to invent and enforce the concept of race was hastened by Bacon’s Rebellion, a multiracial uprising of white indentured servants and enslaved Black people in colonial Jamestown, Virginia, in 1676. The rebels captured Jamestown from the British Crown and, astonishingly, held it for some eight months before the British army could subdue the insurgency. Before the rebellion little distinction was made between laborers from African and European origins; both were seen as a common, unfree class, haplessly below the station of property-owning aristocrats. In the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion, as legal scholar Michelle Alexander explains, “deliberately and strategically, the planter class extended special privileges to poor whites in an effort to drive a wedge between them and black slaves.”
The history of uncritical race theorists’ efforts to enforce disremembering in education is vast and requires examination by those who believe students have the right to learn the truth about the nation’s past. Some precursors of today’s anti-history laws include the mandatory illiteracy laws imposed on enslaved Black people; the Reconstruction era attempts by white missionaries to implement assimilationist instruction to teach newly emancipated Black people to accept white supremacy; the removal of hundreds of thousands of Native American children from their homes—including forcibly removing kids as young as four—who were placed in physically and emotionally abusive boarding schools designed to strip them of their culture; the late 1800s and early 1900s schooling in Hawai’i that taught Native Hawaiian and Asian immigrants to accept colonization and to disidentify with Hawai’i and Asian countries of origin while embracing dominant American world views and values; McCarthy-era attacks that resulted in the firing of thousands of antiracist and leftwing teachers; the “Americanization classes” instituted by the War Relocation Authority in the Japanese American interment/incarceration camps for “indoctrinating the younger generation of Japanese Americans with ‘American values’ ” even as they suffered human rights violations by their own U.S. government; curricular campaigns by groups like the Daughters of the Confederacy that resulted in the valorization of the Confederacy in textbooks during the Jim Crow era and beyond; and attacks on ethnic studies programs, including the outlawing of the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson, Arizona, in 2012.
The current hostility to CRT is indicative of a broader assault on critical thinking. Consider that the Texas GOP adopted a resolution to its party platform that openly opposed allowing students to develop critical thinking, stating, “We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs.” This plank received widespread ridicule; the rebuke was so resounding, the Texas GOP communications director claimed it was all a big mistake, yet said it would be difficult to remove because the platform had been approved by a party convention. Having learned their lesson from this debacle, instead of directly attacking critical thinking, uncritical race theorists landed on the term “critical race theory” as a better target for their attack on any questioning of how power is distributed in society.
Today’s uncritical race theorists, in the same breath they use to decry cancel culture and without even blushing, will call for the canceling of any book or educator that diverges from the orthodoxy of American exceptionalism.
Perhaps I don’t need to persuade you that something is profoundly wrong with a society so terrified of its past that it endeavors to strangle history, dump its corpse in a casket, bury it beneath the earth, and not even leave an epitaph that would allow young people to recognize it had ever existed or be able to appreciate its heritage.
The Backlash Blues
The 2020 uprising for Black lives, ignited by the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, propelled antiracist literature to the top of national bestseller lists and thrust discussions of systemic racism, long marginalized, into the mainstream. Described by The Washington Post as the “broadest in U.S. history,” the protests spanned every state, with various polls estimating between fifteen and twenty-two million people marching for Black lives that summer. In many instances, youth helped to organize and lead these demonstrations and often developed demands for Black studies and antiracist curriculum. As eighteen-year-old Omaha, Nebraska, high school student activist Vanessa Amoah told The Washington Post in August 2020, “George Floyd, Philando Castile—none of it would have happened if this country worked on proactively teaching antiracist values.”
This movement significantly influenced curriculum, prompting many educators to integrate discussions of systemic racism into their lessons. Although only a few cities even temporarily decreased their police budgets as a result of the protests, perhaps the most significant policy outcome of the uprising was the removal of police, or defunding of police, from more than fifty school districts nationwide—demonstrating the power of students and educators in the struggles for racial justice and the importance of education as a site of struggle for the broader social movements. Amid these shifts, uncritical race theorists expressed panic over the growing racial justice consciousness among young people.
As a counter to the uprising, in the fall of 2020, Christopher Rufo, now a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, ignited the attack on truthful teaching when he captured President Trump’s attention with the concocted threat of CRT. During his final few months in office in his first term, Trump fueled a firestorm against antiracist pedagogy, from kindergarten classrooms to government trainings. On Constitution Day, September 17, 2020, Trump announced his new “1776 Commission” to “promote patriotic education” and attack CRT, as a response to the 1619 Project—the initiative begun by Nikole Hannah-Jones and other writers from The New York Times, which “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States’ national narrative.”
Suddenly, educators who had never heard the term “critical race theory” were attacked as CRT indoctrinators simply for teaching the truth about Black history. With the bit firmly in their mouths, the braying jackasses who carry water for the billionaires funding the attack on antiracist teaching branded the various methods for supporting diverse communities of students or teaching about race—such as Black studies, ethnic studies, critical pedagogy, culturally responsive pedagogy, cultural studies, social and emotional learning, or DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion)—all as CRT. The distinctions between these pedagogical methodologies made no difference to politicians who were searching for a way to improve their political fortunes at the expense of educators who were trying to help their students make sense of the uprising for Black lives of 2020 and a deeply unequal society.
Excerpted from the book Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education by Jesse Hagopian. From Haymarket Books. Copyright © 2025. Reprinted with permission.