By David Gordon, associate editor
Critical race theory (CRT) is not a new phenomenon and alarms over it would have long since been sounded if it truly posed problems for society, according to Dale Taylor, a UW-Eau Claire emeritus professor.
Taylor spoke on Tuesday to some 50 retired faculty members and others attending the fall luncheon of the UW-EC Emeriti Faculty Association, at Wild Ridge Event Center. He stressed that he was not discussing how CRT has emerged as a factor in current political controversies or whether it’s an appropriate teaching tool to use in elementary schools.
Instead, he described it as one approach that can be used to study how discriminatory policies have persisted even after the passage of federal legislation to outlaw them. That legislation included the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Taylor said those discriminatory policies continue to contribute to racial disparities in many different areas, including home ownership and death sentences in criminal cases.
Race as social theory
CRT first appeared over half a century ago in the research of two Harvard Law School professors and has been used extensively in law schools – among other places – since then. It became controversial only recently, when the term “made white people uncomfortable,” he said.
Taylor said CRT “is the work of progressive legal scholars working to address” these issues. He added that race, in that context, is a social theory rather than a biological reality.
He specifically listed attorneys and people in several other professions as those who need to be aware of CRT to do their jobs properly, and then expanded the list.
“Everyone should know about this,” he said. “If people aren’t aware of this,” society will not be well served.
News media criticized
Taylor criticized the news media for failing to cover racial disparities adequately and cited the country’s space program as an example. He said there have been dozens of black astronauts and noted that many African-Americans have worked at NASA over the years. That number includes Charles Bolden, who served as the agency’s top administrator from 2009 to 2017.,
“The media stopped covering (it) when they started sending black astronauts,” he said. “NASA is very much a diverse enterprise.”
(Editor’s note: Several online sources, including NASA, listed fewer than two dozen African-American astronauts who have made NASA space flights and several more who completed astronaut training but didn’t fly into space.)
Taylor’s criticism of the news media also included their practice of including racial identifications in negative stories, which helped implant biased attitudes in society. He added that this practice has largely disappeared and noted that some newspapers – perhaps most notably The Kansas City Star in late 2020 – have printed apologies to their local black communities for decades of negative coverage.
The Baltimore Sun ran a similar apology this past February.