A year ago this summer, we looked on in awe as people took to the streets the world over to protest the brutal police murder of George Floyd in the largest Black youth-led multiracial call for racial justice we have seen in our lifetimes. We understood that systemic racism harms us as a nation and as individuals and it holds us back from being the inclusive and fair democracy that we deserve. There was a spirit of hope and possibility in the air as foundation and corporate grant makers rushed to express solidarity and commitment to invest in organizations too often starved for resources.
Today that spirit is being sorely tested, as the far right mounts a range of frontal assaults on racial justice. Among the most troubling of those assaults: the coordinated disinformation and organized attack on critical race theory — which argues that addressing racism in America requires understanding how it appears in the nation’s power structure and systems and is not just the result of individual bad actors. The theory has quickly become a rallying cry for Republican culture warriors, the subject of a spate of new bills in state legislatures across the country, and the hottest topic on Fox News.
The objective here is not to marginalize this academic theory. It is to roll back any progress made to teach and tell an accurate history of America, including its past and current racial injustices. The goal is to scare and silence teachers, local officials, and the media, which have begun to replace myth or gaps with a complete set of facts. The right is using this fight to re-create its success a generation ago in taking over local school boards and using that intensity to drive electoral majorities and to prevent critical thinking in public schools.
Many of those leading the attacks lack a clear understanding of the concept, or even how long it’s been around. Dating to the late 1970s, critical race theory is a framework for understanding the roots of racism and the expansion of civil-rights protections. It teaches that racism is not just a reflection of some people’s prejudices but rather that it is present and active in our power structure and public policies. It focuses on outcomes, not individual actions, and provides a framework for understanding — and dismantling — white supremacy.
State and Local Attacks
Right-wing fearmongering over the idea has led GOP-controlled legislatures in Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas to pass bills to ban critical race theory in schools; other states are weighing similar measures. Last month, Montana’s Republican attorney general issued an opinion declaring that teaching critical race theory and other anti-racism ideas violated state and federal law.
This current wave of attacks is not only a reactionary attempt to thwart the racial reckoning and close political space opened by the uprisings in 2020 but part of a much longer pattern of investments in battles to maintain white dominance and suppress racial progress. That includes the full-throttle defense of monuments to slavery, the Trump administration’s executive order prohibiting federal contractors and federally funded programs from offering workplace diversity training (which the Biden administration revoked), and attacks on the New York Times’s 1619 Project and its leadership.
A Well-Funded Opposition
The ecosystem of attacks is robust and well-funded. It includes a website started by an investigative journalist that invites visitors to report schools teaching critical race theory, lobbyists pushing legislation in states across the country, tool kits and campaign funding for school board candidates. Leading right-wing grant makers have been investing for decades in efforts to influence higher education, laying the groundwork for the assault on the current efforts to help deepen students’ appreciation of how structural racism has influenced American history.
Racial- and gender-justice organizations like the African American Policy Forum and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund have been sounding the alarm, and the National Education Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, and others have joined the fight, branding these measures as efforts to suppress speech about race and deprive students of a more inclusive education.
Progressive Philanthropy’s Slow Response
But progressive philanthropy has been slow to grapple with what is at stake. Foundations have an important role to play, both in urgently defending against these attacks and in recommitting to long-term efforts to fund grassroots racial and gender-justice work. We need to ensure that leaders who are fighting for a truly multiracial democracy have the resources they need.
This is part of a long-term vision on the right, backed by deep philanthropic investments in individual leaders, think tanks, prominent academics, narrative change, and grassroots capacity to help elect sympathetic leaders and shift public support to erase important understanding of historic and contemporary forms of systemic racism.
This funding flows in election years and off years alike. It comes in the form charitable and political contributions distributed at the local, state, and national levels. In progressive philanthropy, there simply has not been the same long-term, trust-based, commitment to racial justice work. We are, bluntly speaking, playing catch-up, and the defenders of white supremacy have a head start.
The effort to suppress teaching of critical race theory aims to reassert white colonial narratives over the direct experience of Black people. This is a moment for progressive philanthropy to prioritize truth over etiquette and to stand in solidarity with our grantees and partners whose work is under attack. We must start by making an honest assessment of the threats and the victories now at stake. We must continue to dismantle the conventional wisdom in philanthropy that gets in the way of long-term funding for Black- and Indigenous-led movements. We cannot afford to shortchange the leaders who are articulating a vision for a multiracial democracy and fighting to bring it to life, sending them into battle with one hand tied behind their backs.
We also must remember that the intensity of this backlash is fueled by our success, not our weakness. When movements are robust and philanthropy steps up, we see monuments to racist mythologies come down and films that reflect the fullness of America’s history and population. It is worth noting that, even with the right in full culture-war mode, the divided Senate just voted unanimously to recognize Juneteenth as a national holiday, and President Biden was the first to commemorate the Tulsa Massacre.
The attacks on critical race theory and the attempt to silence America about its racist past and systemic racism are nothing less than an assault on the breathtaking solidarity we saw last summer to truly shape an inclusive and multiracial democracy. Those who fund and perpetrate these attacks on racial justice and equality are hoping to divide us from one another, prevent us from seeing the humanity in one another, and privilege nostalgia and white comfort over hard truths. We urge all those who were moved to invest in racial justice by the largest movement in U.S. history to redouble their efforts in this new hour of need. Failing to put ample resources into the fight against these attacks puts all of our hard-won victories at risk.
