"Critical Race Theory, Science and Pseudoscience": A Conversation with Victor Ray and Sam Hoadley-Brill (Keywords: Racism; Ignorance; Propaganda; Conspiracy Theories; Pseudoscience)

This conversation was taken from our recent book, Science, Anti-Science, Pseudoscience, Truth, edited by Anthony Morgan. If you enjoy reading this, please consider becoming a patron or making a small donation. We are unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated.

Critical race theory (CRT) is an approach to racial scholarship born in law schools in the 1980s that operates from the premises of pervasive racial inequality and a social constructionist (i.e. anti-essentialist) conception of race. It challenges the idea that the superficially colorblind nature of the law means the law is race-neutral and seeks to explain how landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s failed to deliver on its promises of equality for the racial minorities it was supposed to uplift.

Amongst other things, critics of CRT have argued that it is an anti-scientific research program, which goes against the core tenets of science, such as universality and objectivity. But are these claims correct? Furthermore, to what extent have pseudoscientific claims played an instrumental role in fomenting the increasing backlash against CRT? 

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Jana Bacevic (JB): For better or worse, Critical Race Theory (CRT) is one of the theories that have been the focus of quite a few “discussions” or polemics, not only in social media, but increasingly in the political arena on the whole. CRT has become the bugbear of quite a few right-wing/conservative politicians. Donald Trump famously made sure that CRT can be banned from being taught in schools. Florida, amongst other states, has banned CRT. In the UK, several Conservative ministers, including Kemi Badenoch, engage in almost daily diatribes against CRT.

We’re going to be focusing on the question of what is scientific about CRT. Why are there people, political groups or orientations very much interested in arguing that it is not scientific? Clearly, there’s been an amplification of the viciousness in this context, especially when it comes to the presence of CRT in institutions of primary, secondary, and also higher education. What got you interested in CRT as a body of knowledge at first?

Victor Ray (VR): I am mixed race, and I open my book with a discussion of having the police called on my uncle when I was two because he was a dark-skinned black man and he was accompanying me at a parade. This sort of event was played out repeatedly over the course of my life. So, I have had everyday experience of being aware of very differential treatment depending on who I was with in my family. Then I read a classic 1993 paper by Cheryl Harris called “Whiteness as Property” that talked about the history of the phenomenon of “passing” in the United States and how that provided access for certain kinds of resources. Harris discusses her grandmother, who was a sharecropper in Mississippi, moving to Chicago, passing as white once she was in Chicago in order to get access to a job, and the tension that this created for her and the access that her skin tone provided. So I feel like my personal experience primed me to understand some of the key ideas of CRT.

Sam Hoadley-Brill (SH-B): Various things contributed to my being interested in CRT. I didn’t encounter it in a formal direct setting until my graduate studies studying with Charles Mills, who was the professor I was most excited to work with when I got to the CUNY Graduate Centre. Once I read Mills’ Black Rights/White Wrongs (which I actually read before his more well-known book, The Racial Contract), I was hooked. His frameworks, especially things like epistemologies of ignorance, helped me to understand how little the dominant narratives around race and American history reflected the experiences of people who are not those writing the history books. And it just seemed profoundly unjust to me.

Charles Mills' frameworks, especially things like epistemologies of ignorance, helped me to understand how little the dominant narratives around race and American history reflected the experiences of people who are not those writing the history books.

JB: Victor, one of the things that I really like from your book is the idea that white backlash is also a form of racial reckoning. In that sense, what we see in that context is not only a reaction, but in fact most likely a form of politics that aims to gain particular grounds. Now, when it comes to the critique of CRT, this white backlash is really around its supposedly non-scientific status. We often hear that in the critiques from the likes of James Lindsay: they refer to it as “grievance studies”, argue that it’s only about people’s identity, and hence that it is not scientific. In what ways is CRT scientific?

VR: I think it’s important to start by saying that CRT arose in the context of the US legal situation, and there is an overwhelming amount of social scientific data and evidence for the claim that racism is structural in the United States. You can look at racial discrimination across employment, housing, healthcare, access to education, and so on. Some of this work is descriptive, but a lot of the best work is actually experimental. So, there is a whole host of studies that send black and white men out to apply for jobs, with probably the best known being a 2003 study by Devah Pager called “The Mark of a Criminal Record”. In the study, black and white men went to apply for jobs and she found that white men with a criminal record were more likely to be called back for entry level jobs than black men who had never been to prison.

I also think that the claim that race is a social construction that originated with anthropologists and sociologists in the early to mid-20th century has been verified more recently by geneticists who have showed that racial categories don’t correspond to underlying genetic distributions.

As for the idea that CRT is “just” based on identity, I opened the conversation today talking about my identity, as did Harris in the paper I mentioned earlier. I think these anecdotes help folks understand and relate to the structural level that is much bigger than the individual. It’s a way to connect and get an opening, but then they come in with the empirically verifiable data and show the bigger reality.

In the study, black and white men went to apply for jobs and she found that white men with a criminal record were more likely to be called back for entry level jobs than black men who had never been to prison.

JB: Sam, you are an authority on critics of CRT, not least because you spar with so many of them on social media! What do you think the critics of CRT have against it?

SH-B: I think you have a couple of different categories of criticism. One is from people like Ted Cruz, who argue that CRT is every bit as racist as the Klansmen and white sheets. They argue that CRT says that every white person is a racist, that CRT says that if you have a different skin colour from me, then we’re supposed to hate each other. Of course, it is difficult to find any of these claims being made by critical race theorists. You might find some critical race theorists who think that all white people are racist, albeit probably in a qualified sense, but most critical race theorists do not think that all white people are racist. One of the things that is never acknowledged by these critics is that critical race theorists don’t agree about everything. So, when they say that CRT makes a certain claim, you should probably ask which critical race theories you are talking about.

You also have criticisms that are based on misreadings. Moira Weigel wrote a really great paper last year called “Hating Theory: ‘Cultural Marxism’, ‘CRT’, and the Power of Media Affects”. She read numerous books from anti-CRT writers like Mark Levins, James Lindsay, and Voddie Baucham. Alongside master narratives about how CRT is this evil thing that came from obsurantist scholars of the Frankfurt school to undermine American civilization by pitting the races against each other, you find certain specific misreadings of CRT. For instance, they will take the well-known quote from Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic in which they talk about how CRT is critical of both the dominant liberal order and rights discourse, and they argue that because they’re critical of this, this means they reject it, that they want to dispense with it entirely. And, of course, this is not what it means to be critical of something. Towards the end of his life, Charles Mills was working on a project of black radical liberalism that fuses the insights of the black radical tradition (from which you get CRT) and the liberal tradition, which has historically been a racist tradition from its origins in Enlightenment Europe. Mills is, of course, critical of Enlightenment racism, but he doesn’t think that this legacy means that it’s completely useless. And there are plenty of other misreadings along those lines.

One of the things that is never acknowledged by these critics is that critical race theorists don’t agree about everything. So, when they say that CRT makes a certain claim, you should probably ask which critical race theories you are talking about.

As for the central claim that CRT is pseudoscientific, Karl Popper famously argued that what distinguishes science from non-science is that science is falsifiable. Lindsay uses this position to argue that CRT is unfalsifiable. He claims that CRT argues that racism exists in every interaction in every situation, and that the job of the critical race theorist is not to determine whether racism occurred, but to find where and how the racism manifested. To be fair, Robin DiAngelo does say something like this in one of her papers. Now, DiAngelo doesn’t call herself a critical race theorist, and, even if she did, I would not take this as undermining CRT as a whole in the way that Lindsay does. But I don’t think that these kinds of clarifications would matter to these critics, because it seems like the point is just dunking on CRT. And if that’s their goal, then they have done a pretty good job.

VR: The fact that Christopher Rufo dismisses CRT as being pseudo-science is especially rich because Rufo used to work for the Discovery Institute, an explicitly anti-science, anti-evolutionary think tank that fought for schools in the United States to teach what they call “intelligent design”. They argued that they had some scientists on their team who were willing to say that there was no scientific consensus on the theory of evolution and that therefore, schools should teach kids both the Garden of Eden and evolutionary theory. This is very similar to what folks in the United States did around the debates over global warming, the danger of cigarettes, the ozone layer. There was a well-funded group of think tanks and conservative intellectuals who were willing to lie about the scientific consensus to accomplish a bigger set of political goals. I believe that the same techniques are being used to discredit CRT.

Both of you have hinted at the politics of false equivalence or “both-sides”-ism. The two are somehow made equivalent or equally scientific or equally deserving of being presented as legitimate academic knowledge.

JB: It’s really interesting that both of you have hinted at the politics of false equivalence or “both-sides”-ism. The two are somehow made equivalent or equally scientific or equally deserving of being presented as legitimate academic knowledge. It’s really important to highlight precisely the degree to which even the introduction of these de facto fringe pseudo-scientific and sometimes even explicitly conspiracy-oriented theories shifts the debate and contributes to political polarisation that we’re seeing today.

Why is it that the status of science seems to matter so much for CRT detractors? Why is it that they’re so intent on claiming that it is not scientific or that it is even anti-scientific? And why is it that some of them would tend to, in a manner of speaking, both endorse and reproduce things that are very far from being scientific – including so-called “race science”?

VR: Science has lots of credibility in some quarters and they’re worried about credibility. One of the things that is clearly shown in Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s 2010 book, The Merchants of Doubt, is that introducing doubt into the general public was enough to undermine scientific consensus, because the general public typically doesn’t understand scientific method. Rufo is explicit about this: he said that his desire to start this moral panic around CRT was a response to the protests around George Floyd and the general public recognising structural racism as a real problem. It was very clear that Rufo was looking for a weapon to undermine the legitimacy of scientific claims about the pervasiveness of racism in the United States.

Introducing doubt into the general public was enough to undermine scientific consensus, because the general public typically doesn’t understand scientific method.

SH-B: The final chapter of Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois is called “The Propaganda of History”. Du Bois writes about this connection between science and history, and about the basically anti-scientific attitude of the history that children are being taught about reconstruction. He writes:

"If history is going to be scientific, if the record of human action is going to be set down with that accuracy and faithfulness of detail which will allow its use as a measuring rod and guidepost for the future of nations, there must be set some standards of ethics in research and interpretation. If, on the other hand, we are going to use history for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego, and giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment, then we must give up the idea of history either as a science or as an art using the results of science, and admit frankly that we are using a version of historic fact in order to influence and educate the new generation along the way we wish."

One of my favourite lines from Victor’s book is when he says that CRT is an intellectual bulwark against the propaganda of history. I think that is connected to the desire to portray it as anti-scientific, because if it is acknowledged that CRT and the foundational premises of CRT are in accordance with scientific consensus in the social sciences about racial inequality, then that could be a serious threat to the national myth about America always progressing forward as a nation founded on liberty and justice for all. So, I think it’s very significant that we should recognise the significance of national identity and the fact that the identity of many Americans is intimately bound up with this sense of patriotic nationalism.

CRT is an intellectual bulwark against the propaganda of history

JB: This is similar to the UK where conservative thinkers tend to portray the UK as a progressively more inclusive society, including claiming the abolition of slavery as a feature of progress that England has brought to the world. They also use examples of racially minoritized individuals who have ascended to relatively high positions of power (including in state bureaucracy) as a reason to claim that it is a racially integrated society. So, there’s definitely something to be said about the deeply affective note of the critique of CRT. They seem to feel that any criticism is basically just spoiling their enjoyment of this wonderfully integrated, ever-progressing society.

Further Resources:

• Tommy J. Curry, “The Real Critical Race Theory”. The Philosopher and the News podcast, 15 June 2021.

• Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as property”. Harvard Law Review, 106 (1993)

• Charles W. Mills, Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism. Oxford University Press, 2017

• Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters and Why You Should Care. Penguin, 2023

• Moira Weigel, “Hating Theory: ‘Cultural Marxism,’ ‘CRT,’ and the Power of Media Affects”. International Journal of Communication, 17 (2023)

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