Professor Tanya Hernández was interviewed by Business Insider for an article discussing her experience as a professor of Critical Race Theory during the recent outbreak in discourse and misinformation surrounding the discipline.
Tanya Katerí Hernández feels fortunate to be a tenured professor at Fordham University School of Law, a private Catholic institution in New York City that she said supports her teaching on critical race theory.
But she told Insider she worries about what might happen if, for instance, her family needed her to move to another state where the laws involving her expertise are becoming hostile. She questions whether she could teach what she sees as the most important issues for her students to learn elsewhere without being fired.
“That is sort of like living under a Red Scare, almost,” she said, a reference to the McCarthy-era, Cold War hysteria when accusations of communist sympathies could end careers. “That’s the closest that I can conceptualize it as.”
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Hernández, who is working on her third book in a series on racial discrimination and the civil rights struggle, has taught critical race theory for 25 years and she grew accustomed to blank stares from people when she explained her work because they didn’t know the term.
Now that people have heard about it in the news or on Saturday Night Live, she said, they are either curious or misinformed. “They think it’s part of an anti-whiteness mode of analysis or a racial hate platform,” she said, adding that that’s “completely untrue.”