I taught critical race theory. I am not your enemy.
This fierce debate lacks a clear and shared definition of what the idea is.
Istood in front of dozens of drowsy 11th graders and held up a piece of fruit. Whatever I could get my hands on in the cafeteria that day: an orange, a banana or an apple. “What is critical literary theory?” I asked them, turning the apple in the air. “Imagine that this apple is a book,” I said. “Critical theories are tools we can use to understand the apple.” A learned person, I suggested, should have the ability to use any theory, any lens, even those with which she may not agree.
“A formalist theorist might look at this apple,” I said, and ask, “Do I know this is an apple because it’s round or because it’s red or because it tastes like an apple? What makes it a good apple?”
The kids laughed.
“A psychoanalytic theorist might look at this apple and ask, ‘How is a woman holding this apple different from a man holding it given our archetypal stories about apples and sin?’”
The kids laughed again.
In order to sell a class with a title as boring as “Critical Approaches to Literature” I had to demystify things. I had to use a prop.
For almost 10 years, at a local high school, I taught a 12th grade AP English course called “Critical Approaches to Literature” that included a unit on critical race theory. I’ve read and listened to the recent debate over CRT in education with a range of emotions from amused detachment to outright incredulity to disappointment at the way both sides frame their arguments. What’s missing from so much of the debate are the actual human beings in the classrooms, the teachers and students and their relationships with one another.
The private school where I taught leans conservative. Lush pockets of loblolly pines line the vast campus and ample sports fields, where future University of Texas
MBA or Ivy League students learn in hightech, book-filled classrooms. The students have choices in what classes they want to take and I had to pitch my elective course to them. To win them over, I needed them to grasp the idea of critical literary theory quickly.
“What if you’ve only ever understood an apple one way? What if you could have many ways to look at the apple and choose the ones that give you the clearest picture of the apple and its worth?”
If I were to assess the apple from a CRT lens, I might ask, “Do Black people have the same access to this apple — and fresh food — as white people? Why? Or, when we think of the story of this apple, do we include the story of those who tended to the orchard in which it grew?”
Reasonable questions, those are, for any reasonable mind, conservative or liberal. The fierce debate over CRT has lacked a clear and shared definition of what it is. The idea, first developed in law schools, was simply that the legacy of racist laws in the past continues to this day. For example, a city built around segregation 100 years ago is likely still segregated and unequal today. The bills that passed this year in the Texas Legislature ban what is a misinterpretation of CRT — the idea that a white child is intrinsically a bad person by virtue of their skin color. I never taught that way and don’t know anyone who has. Nonetheless, Gov. Greg Abbott has asked the Legislature to consider even more proposals to clamp
down on teachers during the special session that began last week.
Some years more students signed up for my class than other years. Turns out it takes a certain kind of person to trust a woman holding an apple. Quite often, a subset of the very brightest students signed up. Despite the conservative bent to our school, pushback from students or parents during my CRT unit was rare. I worked there long enough for students and parents to know me, and trust me.
The resistance I did get came from the students who couldn’t differentiate between someone teaching an idea and someone espousing it. Usually, it was a matter of simple projection: “This theory shakes something up in me and I feel bad, so I’ll make my teacher the bad guy.” Nevertheless, I hope that a seed was planted that will help them grow in intellectual flexibility and deep thinking. I never once had a Black student misunderstand critical race theory; lived experience, as we all know, is a rich primer.
One student I taught early on — a clever, young white man — continued to insist, “But Black people can be racist too.” Sometimes he’d shake his head as other students talked or rest his head on the desk while in small groups. He stopped smiling or joking. His written assignments, once sophisticated, became half-hearted and mediocre. I knew I was losing him.
As I got better at teaching CRT, his kind of reaction resolved itself, for several reasons: First, I worked hard to build a sense of community in my classroom. My students knew me, as a human being. Most of them knew I loved them — as people — more than I loved any of their test scores or their political positions. I learned to respond to a statement like “Black people can be racist too,” by saying, “Maybe. But it’s interesting that you want to start there. Can we start by looking at what the stories suggest to us about Black experience in America?” I also chose better books, and I asked a colleague of mine to co-teach part of the unit, and for years he did so during his own free time, outside of any professional obligation or compensation.
He’s a Black man and a beloved teacher and visual artist. Together we modeled for students what it’s like to have a conversation about art and CRT from different backgrounds, with humor and friendship and respect. No matter how powerful the theory, it’s best taught — not from a podium — but in a relational space, because we learn more from direct experience with one another than we ever do from textbooks.
My class did not ask students to adhere to a worldview or ideology; it equipped them with the skills to step into someone else’s worldview. Stepping into another lens, of course, can shift one’s own worldview. But it can just as easily strengthen it. Put another way, I always hoped my class empowered them to turn the kaleidoscope on any current event, piece of art, political system or public policy, and notice how the stones might rearrange themselves into new patterns. It also invited them to live in-between, in the borders between certainties, in a space where Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” might be racist and beautiful, where Othello might be a perpetrator and a victim, where a nation might be violent and full of promise.
The last time I taught Critical Approaches to Literature, the president of the Young Liberals Club, a South Asian young woman, and the president of the Young Republicans Club, a white male, signed up to enroll. Unfortunately, the YRC president couldn’t make my class work with his schedule, and he expressed his disappointment to me. What a thing that might have been, in my classroom and in our state, to have those two minds together in the room and in thoughtful dialogue about CRT.
The politicians who oppose CRT don’t seem to believe in teacher-student relationships or the possibility of trust in a classroom. They don’t seem to believe in the intelligence of children. Critical race theory isn’t dangerous in and of itself. Neither is an apple. In the hands of an ineffective teacher, any theory could become ideology. If we let that fear drive our decisions, we’d have to ban topics in highlevel physics and biology too, courses where theories abound. It begs the question: Why ban the complex theory about race?
The teaching of CRT — or any advanced academic idea — requires that the teacher be in “right relationship” with her students and experienced in both content and pedagogy. If people are worried about how complex content is taught, they might start by investing resources in teachers and schools rather than banning the content outright.
Those opposing critical race theory in schools are like my weakest students, but without the excuse of being teenagers. And we’re all victims of their go-to defense mechanism, a mass projection of their own discomfort and ambition and fear. They view knowledge and critical inquiry as a threat, a poisoned apple. They’d very much like us to believe America is a Garden of Eden with no original sin. But we’re not innocent. Critical race theory doesn’t “teach students that America is bad,” as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis argues. America already is, like any place or person, a combination of good and bad; critical race theory reveals that complexity.
I recognize the blatant irony here: that lawmakers want to ban CRT in public schools, in essence limiting the multiple lenses available through which students may learn, while in private schools — even conservative ones — we’re likely to continue to teach CRT because our missions and bottom lines demand that we prepare students for academic rigor and intellectual diversity. This is the exact kind of inequity of which CRT attempts to make us aware.
Critical theories tempt students, not into ideology or division, but into a love based on serious attention, the kind of love teachers bestow on students when we see them, not as vessels to fill or encase, but as kaleidoscopes trustworthy enough to hold many brilliant ideas at once, turning and turning them, as they try to discover the most beautiful way for us all to fit together.