13 important points in the campus & K-12 ‘critical race theory’ debate

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2021-07-07 05:00:05

After many, many requests for my thinking 1 on the topic of bills that seek to regulate teaching of concepts related to race and gender (and facile accusations that by not commenting, I have revealed I am on the wrong side!), I have decided to hammer down my thoughts into these 13 points. Note that while the bills are popularly known as “anti-critical race theory” bills, that’s a misnomer I’ll address below. Instead, I’m calling them “divisive concepts” bills, which better captures what they seek to regulate.

Caveat: Some of what I discuss below, primarily issues relating to K-12 education, is beyond FIRE’s purview, which is limited to America’s colleges and universities, and accordingly — as per usual at ERI — what I say is my opinion and not an official FIRE position.

As you may have noticed, there are a lot of these bills. It would take a law review article or book to achieve perfect specificity and comprehensiveness in addressing each of them. Indeed, there are so many that it has made discussion of the bills difficult, with some being clearly unconstitutional, while a few others essentially reiterate existing racial discrimination law and seek to ban the kind of compelled ideological speech that is already prohibited under the First Amendment.