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--:-- Shanita Basu: This is In Conversation from Apple News Today. I'm Shanita Basu. Every weekend, we're taking you deeper into the best journalism on Apple News. In news headlines, at school board meetings, on the campaign trail, everyone is talking about critical race theory. Critical race theory is a political agenda that is absolutely in our schools. The American Medical Association has gone woke. The organization releasing a language guide that promotes critical race theory. And let me tell you right now, critical race theory is bigoted. It is a lie and it is every bit as racist as the Klansmen and white sheets.
--:-- Shanita Basu: OK, let's pause because everything you just heard there, none of it accurately reflects what critical race theory is. And the irony of it all is one of the key founders of critical race theory, a man named Derek Bell, spent his whole life studying this exact dynamic of liberal reform and conservative backlash. He said that, you know, any effort at reform would invariably be met by an entrenched opposition trying to reinstate the status quo ante. And that is what we've seen. That's Jelani Cobb speaking. He's a staff writer for The New Yorker, and he recently wrote a profile of Bell that explores his path from champion of the civil rights movement to critic.
--:-- Jelani Cobb: He was a famous civil rights attorney and legal scholar. He started his career with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and he was optimistic that America's racial inequalities could be fixed. He goes into this believing that in fighting the good fight, you're going to uproot all of these wrongs. And it doesn't turn out that way. And this leaves him quite perplexed. And so it sends him on a quest to kind of understand where the movement went wrong and where the movement fell short.
--:-- Shanita Basu: You see, Bell spent the first part of his career working to desegregate schools. After the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, there was a lot of optimism from Bell and other civil rights leaders that this would be a major step in the fight for equality. But over time, Bell became disillusioned with the movement. He stopped practicing law and went into academia. He started to write about how efforts to outlaw racism were ultimately misguided. He was very skeptical and even pessimistic about efforts at racial reform in American society. That disillusionment would become the foundation of critical race theory.
--:-- Jelani Cobb: In my conversation with Shanita Basu, we talked about how real critical race theory can help us understand today's debate over fake critical race theory. The narrative about the civil rights movement that we hear, even kind of commonly now, was that it was a great moral awakening in the society, and people recognized the wrongs of racism, of overt institutionalized racism. And Derrick Bell wasn't so sure that that was the case. You know, he said that racial progress in this country has happened under circumstances overwhelmingly under circumstances in which it has served the interests of particular and powerful groups of whites.
--:-- Shanita Basu: And let me tell you, I want to jump forward in time a bit and actually talk about what critical race theory is not, because that is a big part of what's occupying our current political discourse. When some folks who are more conservative talk about critical race theory, what are they referring to? What do they actually mean by that?
--:-- Jelani Cobb: Yeah. So there are people who have just mischaracterized what critical race theory is in a way that is so stark that I find it hard to believe that it was done in good faith. Which is to say I think there are people that are just lying about what this is, what this movement is. But people have generally used it as a catch-all term for anything that they dislike about the discourse regarding race or anything that is a critique of American society that involves its racial shortcomings.
--:-- Shanita Basu: And that is a kind of separate distinct category of scholarly inquiry. And specifically the 1619 Project, which was a product of the New York Times and the journalist Nicole Hannah-Jones. And they've just taken an approach to lumping all these things in together, calling them critical race theory and saying that they oppose them. And so people have called Black Lives Matter part of critical race theory, which is not at all the case. Various forms of anti-racist literature are called part of critical race theory. You know, anything, the historical critiques of American society and the way that racial hierarchy is baked into our institutions has been called critical race theory. And that isn't any more part of it than the other things I've listed.
--:-- Jelani Cobb: But that's where the conversation is right now. And not to ask you to pathologize too much, but why mischaracterize the term? Why use it in this way? It's hard to say, but I think the closest explanation we have is that Christopher Rufo, who is a conservative policy advisor who's been really at the center of driving this conversation about critical race theory in a series of tweets in which he was possibly more revelatory than he intended to be, said that he was attempting to change the meaning of the term and associate, kind of stigmatize it in the minds of people who hear it.
--:-- Shanita Basu: And the fact that this came in the aftermath of George Floyd's death, when there was a very serious reckoning, people began to ask themselves about the role that race plays in American society in a very serious way, in a way that we hadn't seen in many, many years. And the response to that was to stigmatize the literature that was examining these questions that related to race. And so I think there was a kind of general social investment, especially as we saw those kinds of questions and inquiries translating into political appeal and political authority. And so in order, I think, to upend the political power that this movement was generating, it had to be stigmatized in a particular way.
--:-- Jelani Cobb: You know, I can't help but think that the misuse of this term, even if we can sort of separate that out and put that aside for a moment, the concepts behind critical race theory feel so, so valid to be bringing into the discussion today, right? I mean, if you could put on your Derrick Bell cap for a second, what do you think Derrick Bell would have to say about this particular moment?
--:-- Shanita Basu: It's weirdly ironic because it's this almost a kind of meta narrative in which people attack Derrick Bell as a means of validating everything he said. Because he would jokingly say when people would ask what's critical race theory, he would jokingly say it's the theory that if you talk honestly about race, you'll be criticized. And that's pretty much what has happened. He was very skeptical and even pessimistic about efforts at racial reform in American society. He would not at all, I think, have been shocked to see his own work mischaracterized in the way that it has been or to see himself at the center of a political storm even this many years after his death.
--:-- Jelani Cobb: And interacting with him, you know, I would sometimes feel that he was, I mean, it was refreshing to see a person willing to critique a movement that people thought was sacrosanct, because, you know, no movement was perfect. But even his admirers thought that he was sometimes a bit too skeptical or a bit too pessimistic. And it seems that he's been winning a lot of arguments posthumously.
--:-- Shanita Basu: So it sounds like we can imagine that Bell would clearly understand the dynamics of how conservatives and how progressives are debating school curriculums today. But the other thing I want to say about this is that the other part of it that's really kind of striking is that I interviewed former students of his, people who had taken his classes both at Harvard and at NYU Law School, where he ended the last 20 years of his career or so. He was profoundly tolerant of dissenting viewpoints in his classroom, and that there were conservative students who took his class and felt that he had been fair to the vantage points, even as he had a particular critique that they tended to disagree with.
--:-- Jelani Cobb: And, you know, it's an irony to kind of see his work being used in a way that kind of validates intolerance or furthers intolerance of dissenting views. It's an irony, and yet I'm sure you can sort of just picture him nodding his head along to the whole thing, like you said, just sort of saw it all coming.
--:-- Shanita Basu: What do you think Bell would think about the progressive push to have more discussions in school that acknowledge racism in U.S. history and in society? Would Bell see a path forward for schools to sort of play a role in acknowledging racist systems in America?
--:-- Jelani Cobb: I don't think that would have been controversial to him. And I think that fundamentally being aware of how our society has really been fractured and driven by race would have been something consistent with his views on the world and, you know, kind of key to this. Because even outside the kind of framework of whether this is critical race theory or it is not critical race theory, The fact is that we have generally avoided talking about and tried to euphemize our way out of talking about the most unsavory and difficult aspects of American history in American society.
--:-- Shanita Basu: And so when we talk about now the kind of contemporary rhetoric that we hear that the language of opposing critical race theory has been in the name of defending white children from being made to feel bad. And, you know, it's an astounding kind of irony because we're talking about the existence of dynamics in our society that have made millions, tens of millions of children of color feel bad over the course of decades and successive generations and centuries.
--:-- Jelani Cobb: And so that's what we're confronted by, a kind of hierarchy of do we want to think about the discomfort people may feel hearing about these issues or the discomfort that people feel experiencing them? How do you see this conversation about anti-racism education evolving as a political battleground?
--:-- Shanita Basu: Well, I think that we've seen pretty much where we are. The battle lines are drawn. And these are just more stark discussions than we've been having before. I mean, not very long ago, the Texas school system was trying to change the phrasing triangular slave trade into triangular trade and refer to people who were enslaved in Texas as workers as opposed to slaves. And so we've reached a kind of death by euphemism part of our school curricula in particular places. And even to this day, we can't have an honest conversation about what the Confederacy meant and what the Confederacy fought for.
--:-- Jelani Cobb: And so it's difficult to get beyond that. And so we've now just reached a moment where these things are exacerbated and they're more public. But they've been going on for a really long time. And the efforts to prevent an honest reckoning and an honest assessment of American history have been astoundingly successful.
--:-- Shanita Basu: I understand that you knew Bell in a somewhat casual way that you had been in correspondence before. And one thing that you wrote in this piece that I've been thinking about, I was hoping you could talk about a little bit more, is the last time you were in contact, it was 2008. You were exchanging some emails. it was just months before Obama won the election. And it sounds like Bell had a pretty bleak outlook.
--:-- Jelani Cobb: So I sent out an email recognizing James Baldwin's birthday, which is August 2nd. And Derrick Bell was one of the people on the email list. And he responded to the email about what James Baldwin would make of the current racial landscape on the verge of electing the first black president. And certainly at that point, we were experiencing the first black legitimate contender for the presidency. And the language of post-raciality was already being bandied about.
--:-- Shanita Basu: So even kind of skeptical observers thought that this was a great landmark in American society, that we were embarking on this possibility. And Derrick Bell had a decidedly more cynical if not outright pessimistic view of these developments
--:-- Jelani Cobb: And so in the email he said that the election of a black president would like the Brown versus Board of Education decision and the 1964 Civil Rights Act be a moment in which much was promised and nothing was delivered, except for potentially hastening the premature demise of American democracy.
--:-- Shanita Basu: And I read that and just, I remember like moving back from the computer as I read that. Some dark energy coming off the screen. Yeah, because I was so shocked. And it was such a discordant view, you know, that I wondered if his skepticism, which I respected, had curdled into kind of maybe curmudgeonly pessimism.
--:-- Jelani Cobb: And you know, I remember just thinking like wow and the other kind of element to this is that Derrick Bell knew Barack Obama when Barack Obama was a law student at Harvard. They didn't have sustained interaction but when Derrick Bell took a leave of absence to protest the fact that Harvard had never tenured any woman of color at the law school when he did that there was a rally and recognition of his stance, the stance that Bell took. And he was introduced by the president of the Harvard Law Review, which was Barack Obama. And so there's footage of Obama introducing Derrick Bell to speak at this rally.
--:-- Shanita Basu: And so the fact that he knew not only that there was going to be potentially a black president, but that he knew the person who was going to occupy that role and still had this astounding skepticism about it really took me. And so that's where things stood until the Trump era, when Obama's existence had become the rationale for this reactionary political movement that was rapidly eroding some of the cornerstones of American democracy. And I started thinking maybe Derrick Bell wasn't so far off. And then on January 6th, I started wondering if Derrick Bell had been prophetic because the retrenchment and the reactionary anti-Obama movement had become so powerful and so threatening and so anti-democratic that it seemed like he saw it all along.
--:-- Jelani Cobb: I have a last question for you, Shanita. And I'm just thinking about anyone who's listening to this. Maybe they've been to a school board meeting and heard this being discussed. Maybe they, I don't know, they have kids in their lives. They know kids in their lives. They know about this conversation around schools. How can understanding real critical race theory make us better prepared to think about the ideological warring over fake critical race theory?
--:-- Shanita Basu: So I think that if we understand what critical race theory kind of explores, the fact that we live in a society in which people's life outcomes are largely impacted by their racial background still, despite there being a civil rights movement and despite there being this theoretical commitment to equality, then we can begin to understand. And that there are forces that have made this happen, that it hasn't happened by happenstance, that there have been deliberate attempts to reinstate this state of affairs, then we can start looking, I think, more skeptically at why we're dealing with this fake controversy and why there's this investment in discrediting anti-racism as a movement and as an idea.
--:-- Jelani Cobb: And more fundamentally, when people question me about why it's important to examine this history at all, one of the things that I always point out is that teams watch their game tape to see what they did wrong, not what they did right. You know, that we study history to understand what our potential vulnerabilities are and that it's not a coincidence that America's enemies have historically and in the contemporary context always seen race as the Achilles heel of American democracy for good reason. And that they study the shortcomings of race in American society exhaustively. If they do so, it would be wise for us to do the same.
--:-- Shanita Basu: Jelani Cobb, so good to speak with you about this. Thank you so much for your time.
--:-- Jelani Cobb: Thank you.
