New Critical Race Theory Report Confirms ‘Tide Is Changing,’ Expert Says

Parents concerned about critical race theory (CRT) took home buttons like this from a school board activist training put on by the The Leadership Institute in Sarasota, Fla., on Jan. 19, 2022. (Nanette Holt/The Epoch Times)

State and local countermeasures against critical race theory (CRT)—a quasi-Marxist framework that views the United States as systemically racist—are on the rise in 2023, at a pace equal to or faster than that of 2021 and 2022, according to a new report (pdf) released by CRT Forward, an initiative advocating for CRT in schools at the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law.

Anti-CRT measures in higher education and pushback on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies are also trending higher in 2023, according to LaToya Baldwin Clark, a co-author of the report and an assistant law professor at UCLA, at a webinar releasing the report’s findings on April 12.

A webinar releasing the findings from a report on critical race theory by CRT Forward, on April 12, 2023. (CRT Forward/Screenshot via The Epoch Times)

Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation and an expert on CRT, said the UCLA report is “fascinating.”

“What it does is it quantifies the impact that the resistance to CRT has been,” he told The Epoch Times.

“About two weeks ago, Ibram X. Kendi went on CNN and complained that their momentum had been crushed by organized resistance. And there was a panel that included Robin DiAngelo; they complained about the same thing,” Gonzalez noted of two major CRT authors.

“They said they had great hopes in 2020 and the beginning of 2021. But then, they encountered this level of resistance from the American people and their elected representatives. And the tide is changing. So I think this is what this report is about.

“I think that the conservatives should not say mission accomplished. There’s a lot to be done, a lot, a lot. But I think conservatives should be comforted by the fact that there has been significant resistance.”

According to the UCLA report, 563 measures were introduced at the state and local levels in 2021 and 2022 to restrict CRT in either classroom teaching or curricular materials; among them, 241 became adopted policies. Measures recorded in the report include legislation, resolutions, regulations, official statements, and policies; they affect 22 million children, about half of the 50.8 million U.S. public school students, Clark said.

She also said that she foresaw more state-level scrutiny of DEI spending in 2023, which in her words, were “very bureaucratic, burdensome ways of trying to get school districts and teachers not to teach CRT or anti-racism because they don’t want to then be subjected to all of these procedural bureaucratic requirements going down the line.”

Although red states adopted many more state-level measures than blue states, the numbers of adopted local measures are very similar between red and blue states. Gonzalez said this is because of blue states’ many conservatives in various localities.

‘Divisive Concepts’

The year 2020 saw an escalated push of CRT in the United States after the death of George Floyd, a black man, after a white Minneapolis officer kneeled on his neck for minutes during an arrest. At the webinar, Clark called the rise of “racial demands for justice and equality” in that year the “2020 uprising” and “2020 revolutions.”

Gonzalez, meanwhile, referred to it as the “2020 insurrection,” during which many cultural institutions adopted the CRT view that the United States is systemically racist.

“[The left] didn’t realize what they were doing; they actually went too far in 2020,“ he said. ”They thought they had the country in their hands and they were going to be able to dismantle the country. And what they did was wake the American population.”

He also said that he had spoken to many people across the nation as he traveled during and after the pandemic.

“What I encountered was the institutions of civic society rising up and saying, ‘No. No, we don’t like this. We don’t want this.’ And I think that changed the climate of opinion in the country.

“Obviously, in any democracy, that’s going to have an electoral impact and an impact on legislators, especially at the state level. And what they have done is that they have reacted by trying to shield the country from this attempt to transform it.

“This UCLA report confirms that there has been this resistance to the transformation of America, to the dismantling of America, to the destruction of America’s cultural infrastructure.”

Mike Gonzalez, senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, in Washington on Sept. 22, 2020. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

The report traced the large-scale anti-CRT movement to former President Donald Trump’s executive order (EO) in September 2020. Although quickly rescinded by President Joe Biden in January 2021, the “divisive concepts” descriptions in the EO have been repeatedly used in anti-CRT measures, according to both presenters at the webinar, Clark and senior attorney Emerson Sykes at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Clark acknowledged that the pushback on CRT existed before the September 2020 EO.

“And [the EO] wasn’t something that [Trump] just thought of on his own. There were many conservative operatives, conservative organizations, and people who were pushing the Trump administration to do something along the lines of what they did.”

‘New and Innovative Ways’

Sykes touted the ACLU’s legal success in halting Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” or “Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act” in universities and workplaces. The Act prohibits schools and workplaces from including CRT in their teachings and training.

After Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the legislation into law in April 2022 with an effective date of July 1, U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker granted a preliminary injunction in August, blocking the restriction on companies’ CRT training. Then, in November, he granted another injunction and suspended the part of the legislation concerning colleges. However, the law is still effective in K-12 schools.

Sykes explained that such lawsuits were few because the legal system is protective of students in K-12 schools and wary of indoctrination. In addition, it was challenging to find plaintiffs “with Ron DeSantis going on TV every day, coming up with new and innovative ways” of warning educators not to teach CRT.

In response to a question about whether CRT or a different version of CRT from conservatives’ understanding was taught in schools, Clark said, “I don’t think that it is a good strategic move to say CRT is not being taught in schools.”

She suggested framing the issue not as anti-CRT but as resisting racial progress. Now that the tracking mechanism of the CRT Forward project is in place, she says, “part of the strategy has been ... to keep [CRT] top of mind ... when it comes to the 2024 election.”