A virtual forum featuring an expert on the academic concept of Critical Race Theory (CRT), which has become a hot-button issue in Guilford as well as around the country, drew significant participation as residents appear to be very engaged in the topic that has upended local politics in recent months.

Starting with an impetus from the Human Rights Commission (HRC), Angela Robinson, a former New Haven Superior Court judge who teaches CRT at Quinnipiac University, spoke to more than 300 participants at the town-sponsored event, taking questions and providing a short overview of CRT.

Robinson notably had presented to the HRC last month, and subsequently received an anonymous, threatening email that HRC Chair Jo Keogh said factored into Robinson’s decision not to physically set foot in Guilford.

A grassroots group of activists calling itself Truth in Education, or TIE, recently received the endorsement of the Republican Town Committee as candidates for the Board of Education (BOE), accusing Guilford’s schools of teaching racist, Marxist, or Nazi-esque principles to students and connecting all of it to what it calls critical race theory, with scant evidence.

Robinson, who has extensive experience in law and runs a consulting business along with teaching college courses on CRT, said that having a real understanding or to hold a conversation about the underlying issues requires people to both speak and listen more deeply on these issues.

“I think we have to be honest in the fact that race is the tool that is most often used to divide us,” Robison said. “We don’t want to use race to divide, we want to bring it as a bridge.

“That requires us to talk about race,” she added.

Robinson traced the origins of CRT to 1989 when a conference of law professors, mostly people of color, came together and coined the term to “develop a coherent account of race and the law.”

The principles spread to other advanced academic fields, from neuroscience to sociology, that was meant to explain “why we continue to have race disparities and how we can try to change that,” Robinson said.

Before that, a handful of other scholars had set the principles that would grow into CRT through legal arguments leading up to the Civil Rights Movement and the seminal Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education.

“CRT, despite what a lot of critics say, is not something that you’re going to encounter in elementary or high school. It’s not even all that often offered at colleges,” Robinson said. “Even the critics of CRT acknowledge that there are...about maybe 200 to 300 colleges that teach CRT, and that’s out of 4,000.”

CRT has certainly influenced popular writers like Ibram X. Kendi, Robinson said, whose book, How To Be An Anti-Racist, was purchased by the district last year.

But she drew a sharp line between those influences, which are broad and conceptual, and what CRT actually is.

“Topics that relate to racial identity are not necessarily CRT,” she said.

Perceived biases against White people or any other race are not at all a part of CRT, according to Robinson, with scholars simply trying to understand the landscape of race in context in which different groups are not treated equally even if they are inherently equal.

“CRT does not advocate racism in any form. In other words, to be a pure CRT scholar, you must accept the premise that people of all races are equal,” Robinson said.

But CRT believes that racism is pervasive, and that a “color-blind” approach is not a solution to racism, Robinson said. While those realities are often difficult for a lot of people to accept and spark a lot of emotions, they are also principles supported by a preponderance of evidence as racial disparities have persisted in the country.

“We removed explicit race barriers from the law decades ago,” Robinson said, “laws that were explicitly racist, that required segregation...and that was in an effort to create a color-blind approach.

“Structural racism is not something a few people or institutions choose to practice,” she added. “Instead it has been a feature of the social economic and political systems in which we all exist.”

Questions

Though some of the opponents of CRT had asked for some kind of open-ended debate or town hall, the forum did not allow unfiltered participation from attendees.

But Robinson had previously said she hoped to get difficult questions from people who were either skeptical or even opposed to the principles of CRT—and she did, though they were chosen by members of the HRC after being submitted through the virtual chat.

One person said that CRT seemed overly simplistic in blaming so many inequalities and complex interactions on race, specifically naming the school achievement gap. Robinson freely admitted that many things—education, criminal justice, and poverty—certainly had causes and foundations not directly related to race or ethnicity.

“The achievement gap is a very, very complicated issue,” she said. “That’s why CRT looks at it as a systemic thing.”

But not including racism as part of that discussion requires people to see something like the racial achievement gap as somehow inherent or biological—ideas that would be considered racist by almost any definition, Robinson said.

Another person asked why people couldn’t identify as Americans and stop using race-based story telling to push CRT narratives.

“That’s a great question. You gotta come take my class,” Robinson said, laughing.

Stories are important, though, Robinson said, and that telling stories “can get us to where we want to go.” She compared telling the story of an individual enslaved woman who escaped from George Washington’s plantation to simply conveying the number of slaves he owned.

“I don’t think that data could do the same thing,” Robinson said.

Kendi’s writing, which has received pushback from some in Guilford, was the subject of another question, with someone asking about his conclusion that all people are either against racism or complicit in supporting it.

Robinson said that specific idea is Kendi’s, in a book that was very personal to him, and that while she uses the book herself, there are many parts of his scholarship with which she doesn’t agree.

Another question specifically pushed Robinson on whether she thought capitalism was inherently racist, and how to reconcile the belief that all races are equal with the refusal to accept a “colorblind approach.” That person also paraphrased a widely-cited Martin Luther King Jr. quote, asking “what is wrong with judging each other by the content of their character?”

Robinson said she doesn’t personally believe capitalism is “the problem” as far as systemic racism even though some CRT proponents do, but made it clear economic issues were part of any conversation about racial disparities.

“I think people take MLK’s quote out of context. He said a lot more in that speech than just that, he said that our country had made a promise that it had not fulfilled and he also framed it as an economic issue,” Robinson said. “I think that we kind of sugarcoat it to make it sound like we’re all human and if we can just look at the individual then we’ll be fine. And it’s just the way [that] society is structured, it is not possible.”

Another person asked if “equity” as presented in CRT was different from “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” a famous quote by former president Ronald Reagan.

Robinson called that phrase a “dog-whistle that implied that certain groups don’t have to perform well to succeed.”

“I hope that my presentation showed that the field is far from balanced,” she said.

With how white-hot the issue has become emotionally, particularly for those who have tried to oppose CRT, another person asked how people in Guilford could start to bridge the massive chasm to those who have crusaded against equity initiatives and curriculum in the schools.

“Nobody feels good when they feel like they aren’t being listened to,” Robinson said, while specifically making a distinction between people who have a “genuine” interest in learning and conversation with others who are opportunistically taking advantage of the controversy.

Race has always been an incredibly difficult conversation for people, according to Robinson, and White people have also experienced racial trauma in a way that brings out these hyperbolic emotions.

“A lot of the reaction in people in Guilford is because of the trauma,” Robinson said. “And so when you look to the trauma, and the fact that we all have been in a country that for over 200 years have created this dynamic...What happened is, it got transmitted from generation to generation to generation until now. And so we’re all racially traumatized. I think when we come at it that way, we can get to healing.”