Professor Tanya Hernández shared her expert opinion in an article in The Guardian discussing how the nationwide debate over Critical Race Theory (CRT) fuels divides within the Democratic party.
Moral panic over CRT has been fuelled for more than a year by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and other rightwing media, an apparent backlash to racial justice protests that followed the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year. In such hands, CRT became a catch-all for any teaching about race and American history.
“It is a very convenient soundbite for encapsulating everything about the reckoning after George Floyd’s death and the Black Lives Matter movement,” said Tanya Hernández, a law professor at Fordham University in New York.
“It is a way censor to gag and suppress any kind of reconsideration of our status quo.
“Those who are making a lot of noise about critical race theory have no interest in learning what it’s really about because it’s not their focal point, just a nice encapsulation as a reference point of everything they don’t like. They don’t want any discussion about the accuracy and the truthfulness of our racial histories to be taught to children.”