Critical Race Theory has been the topic of debates and political tirades among Texas - and national - politicians and school boards, but what exactly is CRT? Join Gene and Scott as we learn about CRT from Dr. Vida Robertson, Director of the Center for Critical Race Studies at the University of Houston-Downtown, as he helps strip away common misconceptions and provides us with an explanation of CRT. Tune in for a thought-provoking conversation that promises to challenge your perceptions.
Critical Race Theory has been the topic of debates and political tirades among Texas - and national - politicians and school boards, but what exactly is CRT? Join Gene and Scott as we learn about CRT from Dr. Vida Robertson, Director of the Center for Critical Race Studies at the University of Houston-Downtown, as he helps strip away common misconceptions and provides us with an explanation of CRT. Tune in for a thought-provoking conversation that promises to challenge your perceptions.
This podcast is not sponsored by. It does not reflect the views of the institutions that employ us. It is solely our thoughts and ideas, based upon our professional training and study of the family.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Talking Texas History, the podcast that explores Texas history before and beyond the Alamo. Not only will we talk Texas history, we'll visit with folks who teach it, write it, support it, and with some who've made it and, of course, all of us who live it and love it.
Speaker 3:Welcome to another edition of Talking Texas History. I'm Gene Price.
Speaker 1:I'm Scott Sowsby, Gene. What have we got doing today?
Speaker 3:Well, Scott, we've got a friend of mine, actually a colleague of mine, so close are we that his office is next to mine, and that is Dr Vito Robertson at the University of Houston downtown.
Speaker 1:Now, Gene, is that the office you're very rarely in?
Speaker 3:Well, when I'm in my office, it's next to mine.
Speaker 1:I sort of clarify for our listeners.
Speaker 3:That's a good point. Vito Robertson, welcome to Talking Texas History.
Speaker 4:Thank you so much, Dr Price. It is both a pleasure and an honor to be with you today.
Speaker 1:Well, tell us a little bit about your background, Dr Robertson, Tell us about who you are, where you come from, where you're educated, what you, what do you study? All those kind of good things. Well, thank you.
Speaker 4:Thank you, I really appreciate that question. Well, of course, my name is Dr Vito Robertson. I am a professor of English and humanities and I have the pleasure of serving as the director of the Center for Critical Race Studies. I teach courses primarily in African American literature and culture, Latino literature and culture and Asian American literature and culture, In addition to the work that I do in critical race theory and in social justice. I'm originally from the.
Speaker 4:Midwest. I hail from from Indiana, southern Indiana, where I grew up in Evansville. It's one of the most southern city in the state of Indiana. Many of them, many folks, would say it's the beginning of the South, but I think that might be debated.
Speaker 1:I was going to say North Kentucky, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 4:North Kentucky. Grew up there, went to Murray State University, regional university in the far west corner, far southern west corner of Kentucky where I received a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy that's my first love and went on to Miami University, outside of Cincinnati, ohio, where I received a master's degree in in African American literature and literary theory and would finish a PhD and in African American literature and critical theory.
Speaker 1:You know, we hear critical race theory, CRC. That's become the hot button issue for, let's say, a certain part of society like this. I think a lot of people use that term and they don't really know what they're using that term about. So why don't you start us all off and tell us, as an expert, what exactly is your definition of critical race theory?
Speaker 4:Well, Scott, I really again appreciate the question.
Speaker 4:My brother, there is a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation concerning critical race theory. But critical race theory in the academic sense, because we'll have to talk about popular culture a little bit later but critical race theory in the academic sense is a theoretical approach and it is a framework of legal analysis that's based on the premise that race is not a natural or a biological feature of our humanity, but rather that race is a legal designation, it is a social category and a construct and therefore, if race isn't biological, then it must be, as we mentioned, sociological, and that is the sense that it is a tool. Race is a tool that society utilizes to organize us for the purpose of dictating and maintaining certain political and social and economic objectives and disparities. And, of course, critical race theory is really interested in the, in these societal priorities, the way that we've organized ourselves through this mythic but potent construct called race, and structures the systems, the procedures that our society utilizes to institutionalize and make it a part of our customary or colloquial use of of identity.
Speaker 1:That was the best definition I've heard. I don't know how long.
Speaker 3:That's great. Yeah, I'm going to tell you the truth. Scott and I are and I guess we might be considered old school historians and our professors told us we don't do theory, it's just the facts, ma'am, and that's all that we did. I don't know that that's true. I don't know that that is accurate, but a lot of historians I've heard other historians say this too is that we're not really theoristians, we're just looking at the evidence. But so give us some concrete examples of how critical race theory. What are some of the things that it is observed and some of the things that it tells us about the way the United States is structured?
Speaker 4:Thank you.
Speaker 4:Thank you, dr Price. One of the things that critical race theory helps us better understand about our nation's history is that race is one of the primary organizational tools that we deployed in order to organize, to maintain, to build this nation that we love so much. It's impossible, a critical race theorist would say to any historian, it's impossible to appreciate, to understand or even to interrogate history, the history of the United States, without having a full and a fulsome understanding of race as a construct. Because as we were organizing ourselves as a nation, there were some people who were in the room and who wrote those immortal words that all of us, all men, were created equal and they were endowed by their creator with certain unseparable, inalienable rights, and that's life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You would originally say well, hey, vita, we recognize that property was actually in the place of happiness. We know that's the revisionist term of the way that we understand our nation. I'd say that's exactly right.
Speaker 4:Critical race theory would say we need to look at that early formulation because happiness was not the priority at the time. It's an aspirational goal, we would add later. But to your point, if we recognize that the history of our nation is intimately bound in this notion, this concept called race. Then those people who were in the room were not the only people. There were people who had built the room, but they weren't in it.
Speaker 4:There were people whose land that the room was built on, but they were not in it. There were people who spoke different languages, spoke in different parts of the world, that we have to appreciate. That, as we were pinning these immortal words that we are equal, we did not believe them as a people in any meaningful way, that the people, or at least the definition of personhood defined in our constitution, understood throughout our American history is one of racial segregation, is one of dehumanization, and our constitution is an excellent example of the way that we've utilized that. And so I would always argue I'm sure you might agree that historians are constantly deploying theory that we must be critical of both the authors of those first person accounts that we are reading and the constructs, mechanisms, ideologies and philosophies upon which they were recording history, so that we can better understand the way that our history is a prime example of the systemic we would even say in critical race theory, the ordinary racism that is a part of the nation that we all love.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's something that I mean. I'm a Southern historian, I teach something, and I listen to this and say, well, you know, we really don't teach critical race theory and I probably, when I started teaching to be in the classroom, I didn't exactly know the term of critical race theory.
Speaker 1:But then, as I've been examining how I teach it, yeah, I teach critical race theory because you can't discuss the South, particularly without discussing race.
Speaker 1:I have that student evaluations always say well, I took the Southern history class and all we talked about was race and I said that should tell you something. Right there, because Southern history, the ever faceted and tenet of it, is about race, and because it is about race, that means race meant something and they constructed the society based on white supremacy, which is critical race theory to some extent. But that seems to create and this is a long way going on a rant to let you know that I have a question again that that seems to contribute to some consternation on certain political sides and certain elements of society. They don't want to hear that or something and they, you know they do propaganda or whatever they gain a foothold. So you, as a CRT specialist in the public, how would you counter the arguments of opponents who use the, for example? I hear a lot that. Well, CRT itself is actually racist. So tell our listeners how you counter that as an expert.
Speaker 4:Well, the interrogation of race, right in the acknowledgement of the effects of race on our society, is not racist In that definition of the term.
Speaker 4:Every doctor is not actually trying to help. They are simply trying to hurt because some procedures require that we have to cut you or that we put you through some very uncomfortable circumstances in order for you to both appreciate and to ameliorate the disease or the issue that you are experiencing. And so critical race theory is often like that that the uncomfortability and the critical analysis, the kind of biting and cutting criticism that is often brought to bear through this systemic analysis, although uncomfortable and really sometimes quite nuanced and complex, is beneficial in the long run. Because if we hope to live up to our nation's grandest aspirations of life, liberty in the pursuit of happiness for all of its citizens, then we have to fully appreciate the ways that we have failed one another in the organization of our society, its resources and the power imbued therein. So I would simply say examining racism does not make you racist. Ignoring racism actually makes you, both tacitly and sometimes directly, a racist.
Speaker 3:Vita, one of the other things that you know kind of going along with this that I've often heard is that you know, a lot of people think critical race theory is simply a black versus white thing. But in your description you were talking about, you know, people who own the land and whatnot, and so that's not just a two-way street, that you're really talking about a multiplicity of ethnic and racial groups in this theorizing and this viewpoint, and so that's one and two. A question I often hear can black people be racist?
Speaker 4:Yes, again, my brother's, a wonderful question that. Thank you for pushing us into the depths of this conversation. Yes, it is often imagined, again in the popular and popular culture, that critical race theory is simply a kind of Afrocentric rebuttal, that it is just racism from the other side, when, as you point out here, dr Poistad, what critical race theorists are interested in intimately is again the way that we've organized ourselves. If we embrace the notion that all of our identities are referential, that is to say that I can only be black if somebody else is Latino and they can only be Latino if somebody else is native and they can only be native if other people are European or Caucasian, and they can write that really our identities don't actually refer to anything essential, that is, it's not genetic, it's not natural, neither God nor Mother Nature created these categories, but rather they are organizational tools for a society. So then, if this is just a society category, a social construct, then we are stuck with. Well, whatever the delineation between black and Latino is, whatever that is, it's arbitrary. And, as a matter of fact, critical race theorists are going to argue and the historical evidence is going to show that the very definition of Latino keeps changing in reference to the particular political, economic circumstance of the United States, that Latinos are going to enter into the American body politic as white people and racially they are white people, right. But we know, through our legal interrogation right in Hernandez versus Texas or Mendez versus Wallerstein, we know that that very troubled definition of whiteness is going to be challenged because Latinos are never going to be allowed to express themselves, to make full use of our national experiment in the way that their white or European Caucasian brothers and sisters are going to be able to, and this is going to force some incredible conflicts in our legal system that force us both to recognize the legal conflict of racial identity as well as our misunderstandings.
Speaker 4:So, as a referential tool, race does nothing more than organize, and it organizes all of us Again. The mythic notion that there is some kind of genetic difference between black people of the world or Hispanic or Latino people of the world, denies the existence of black Latinos. Or the very notion that we imagine that there are Asian people in the world and we take large swaps of our electorate who are from both India as well as Japan and smash them into a category that only makes sense to us as Americans. It doesn't make sense to anyone else in the world because they are both culturally, religiously, linguistically. They are so profoundly different that only a made up category like Asian could comprise such diverse peoples. So critical race theory is interested in that interrogation, those misnomers and misinformation, those illogical contradictions that force us to embrace that these identities are constructs utilized for the purpose of organizing our society and nothing more. And all of us should be interested in interrogating it, both from our position as well as the positionalities of our brothers and sisters in other communities.
Speaker 1:That's such a. I'm reminded, and anybody I've used this example when people tried to so well, race isn't a social construct, I said, oh really, you don't think it is. And I'm reminded I think it was the 1996 Olympics, it might have been the 2000. I don't remember, and not even before that, because using the term African American was kind of a new thing, it hadn't been used for much. Now I believe it was the sportscaster, jim Langley, and there was a sprinter from Jamaica and he said he's an African and he started stuttering and it was almost like I don't know how to classify this person. He's black, but he's not from the United States, is the African American.
Speaker 1:And that always says see, if you think it's not a social construction, think about that when you're hard having to think about how you're supposed to refer to somebody. But it's not to do this, you know, and the term Latino, of course, is all about divided. Okay, related to that, and because you're doing this so well and better and articulating it better than I've heard in so long, why don't you use how and go back to what is it? Maybe? Maybe five years old, might not be that. Tell us exactly how the anti CRT movement got started, how it starts to divide people.
Speaker 4:With the emergence of Donald Trump into our American political lexicon. Mr Trump allowed for us to of course he's going to follow both Barack Obama, after eight years of political, of us, of course, attempting to secure that broader, richer perfecting of our union that that we've all held to as Americans. But but in in the wake and in response to Mr Obama's presidency, there's going to emerge a moment, a recognition that if this trend stays on track, then we are set up to perhaps be a more egalitarian and more equitable society than we ever imagined. And so, of course, both our history both of you well know our history is littered with these examples. That that, immediately, from the basis that we just discussed earlier, right the foundation of the country was grounded in inequality. The people who were left outside the room were not accidentally is not like. Their invitations were missing and some people just happened to look them over. They were strategically and intentionally not invited to participate in the political, economic and social and the alignment of power that our Constitution describes, and so we began the disparities in the racial inequalities that we see prevalent in our society today. So when we as a nation, start moving toward our greater aims, there, of course, is always going to be a faction, right? That's going to say the historical precedent has always been unequal and therefore to create an equal society is unequal in itself, right? I mean, the logic is staggering, but nonetheless. So here Mr Trump emerges in our political sphere. He emboldens a faction of our society that we don't want to demonize because we recognize and we embrace, both as historians and scholars, that this is endemic to the American experiment. We made this faction, we cultivate this faction of our society and, again, it is our long standing misappreciation of one another that allows for this faction to continue. But he allows for this faction to come into the political discourse and allows for us to start challenging much of the equitable work that was begun under the previous administration. And so he calls, he gives a presidential order that any, any trainings or any opportunities that states might use, any work that schools and teachers might be engaged in that does not resituate the dominant culture that, of course, were established in 1776. Right, and that's literally his commission. Right, the dominant culture of 1776. They are now enemies of the state that, as both the president, he is going to utilize the government in order to locate and to destroy these insurgent ideas from what he imagines as America's romantic or actual past. We know it as a romantic past, and so critical race theory is going to emerge from the enclaves of academia and make it's it, make its way into the center of popular culture.
Speaker 4:Unfortunately, as you mentioned, my brother Scott, you point out that there's a lot, there's an intentional strategy to discredit and therefore dismiss critical race theory as reverse racism. Unfortunately, that was a highly successful campaign. It was a highly successful campaign because understanding what we are talking about as educators, as scholars in it takes an adroit mind and it takes a level of education that often is not available to the masses of our brothers and sisters. And so, of course, this smear campaign was incredibly effective, especially in those political spaces where the grievance of social justice is being. The grievance of social justice, of course, is being sought.
Speaker 4:And so here we are now, at this moment, that many people believe that critical race theory are critical race theory is simply books that have Latinos in it, and that critical race theory has a lot to do with giving other people unfair advantages that they don't, they have not earned, or that critical race theory is destroying the nation, and there's a host of them that I'm sure I do not have to recite for the two of you, but in the chaos of the moment, it is thrown us off our task that the entire point of both the Texas legislation and our public discourse is to make the idea that we construct an unfair system so that we might justify our unfair practices and our unfair outcomes is done a marvelous job. We are now looking at boogeyman and monsters and ghosts in every corner and it does not allow us the intellectual capacity or the kind of social power to move forward in this search for the America that we love.
Speaker 1:So, as we reach the end, dr Vita Robertson, what do you know?
Speaker 4:What do I know? You know, of course, scott, as an academician. We imagine that we know quite a bit, and as we do further study we come to realize that there is still so much more to know. But this one thing I think I do know, and I deeply appreciate Derek Bell. In a famous text called the Faces at the Bottom of the Well the Permanence of Racism in American Society he offers this brilliant insight in his introduction that I didn't really appreciate until it has been amplified for me at this particular social, historical moment in our nation's history.
Speaker 4:Bell argues and I think I know this as real now is that racism is an endemic and indelible part of this American experiment and therefore it is unlikely that we are going to be able to overcome it. We may be able to reduce it, we may be able to redefine it, we may be able to subdue it for moments in time, but our history, as the most of you know, is that there are cycles of racial progress and then we go through cycles where we go back to the dehumanizing and the abusive work premises upon which our nation was founded. And so Bell argues and I think I now know that in order for us to continue this work right. We have a Sisyphean task, that we have to have the kinds of courage and endurance that allow us, even in the face of ongoing pressure and relentless cycles of violence and ignorance, that we can still get up every single day and go about this work, understanding that we are most likely going to lose. So the most important part of our social justice experiment is that we have faith in each other, that we have the courage to stand in the face of insurmountable odds.
Speaker 4:As you just mentioned, the state of Texas is trying to fire me I mean, that's what it believes its goal is is to get rid of the things that we are talking about on this show that, in the face of insurmountable odds, to still have enough courage and enough faith in one another that we pursue that which is good, even in the face of all this calamitous evil and despair. And so I know that in order for us to survive and that's not an existential question in the physical sense, I mean it in the emotional, psychological sense In order for us to survive, we have to have faith, and faith in each other. And, even though there's only sometimes, a few of us are still heading in those right directions, that the moments in time will come when the pendulum will again swing and we'll have an opportunity to express both ourselves and seek out the greatest expression of the people and communities we love because we have a faith in one another.
Speaker 1:Vida, thank you very much for this. This has been a fantastic session. Thank you very, very much. I'll cherish listening to this over and we'll have to talk again. Yes, sir, absolutely. I look forward to it.
Speaker 4:Thank you very much, Vida. Thank you so much, my brothers. Thank you very much for that.