There’s a lot of passionate argument about whether “Critical Race Theory” should be taught in schools. But the meaning of CRT differs greatly depending on who you talk to. What did CRT originally mean, and what does it mean now? What are our children actually being taught? And why do some terms tend to become so thorny over time? Click play to find out.
*FULL TRANSCRIPT*
JOHN McWHORTER: From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm John McWhorter and we need to talk about something.
WORD MEANINGS CHANGE OVER TIME
As I often do, I'm going to start from way outside and then I'm going to zero in. As you'll see, that is a general process that I consider very central to the passage of people and things and words through time. We need to talk about something. So let's start with something like audition. We all know what an audition is. You're picturing somebody nervous on stage. Think about what that word, quote unquote, should mean. The aud is about hearing. The reason that we say audition is because the original idea was that you would listen to someone recite something. Now, it was a natural drifting that you would go from someone reciting something on a stage or in a performance to someone playing an instrument or even someone doing a dance, something that doesn't involve sound at all. It could be a mime these days who auditions, but it started out being about hearing someone say something and then it changed. Words’ meanings change. No one today would say: How dare you use the word audition for dance? What's happening to language? Nobody says that because we all know that words don't always mean what they mean, that the form is often different from the content and that's just the way it is.
Lewd. Lewd used to mean that you were unlearned. It meant that you didn't know things. Now, no one who knows that says, how dare you imply that those people aren't intelligent, when what you're really talking about is issues of morality and sex or whatever lewd is about. You know, you can learn that it used to mean unlearned, but you don't wish that it still did. There isn't a sense that it's wrong that unlearned drifted into meaning that you can't keep your pants up or something like that.
One more, to get a little closer to what we need to talk about. Democratic, and no, I don't mean Greece. I mean the party here in the United States. Democratic once stood for very different things than it does now. Most of us know that Democrats were the party of segregation, for example. There's actually, there's a silly book, and I'm not going to name who wrote it or what the book's title is, because many of us write silly books now and then. I have once or twice, but a silly book that was basically saying that Black people need to stop voting Democratic so much because Democrats have often been quite racist in the past. And this meant things like the fact that Woodrow Wilson, you know, who was a straight up racist, that he was a Democrat, that Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Hugo Black to the Supreme Court and he had been an ex Ku Klux Klan member. All those things are true. But, you know, we think to ourselves, whatever racism we might find in the Democratic Party today, when we're talking about Wilson or what FDR’s priorities were, we're talking about a very long time ago. As history moves along, as conditions change, the parties change. What a Democrat is today is very different from what a Democrat was in 1920. Just like certainly being a Republican now is quite different from what it was in, say, 1865. So words’ meanings change over time. The sequence of sounds comes to refer to different aspects of this vale of tears called life than it once did, right? OK, we all know that. We've got that.
WORD MEANINGS TEND TO NARROW WHEN THEY CHANGE
Words’ meanings don't only change, they often get more specific. They narrow. But it's not always about value, just they get more specific. It starts out general and then it gets down to cases. My favorite example of this is reduce. Reduce is from re, as in going back to, and then duce, leading. It used to be that reduce just meant going back to the way it was. That could be a good thing or a bad thing. That could be an increase or a decrease. It used to be that you could reduce something to its former glory. Get that? That it meant take it back to its former glory. Not that glory was somehow down in the dirt, but reduce just meant to take something back. Now, it could also mean to take something down into the mud, and that is what the word ended up meaning. And so we think of reducing as going down. But that is not what somebody would have thought of 500 years ago. The word changed. It got more specific. It happened to drift into a choice.
Getting a little closer to what we need to talk about today, how about diversity? We know what diversity means or don't we? Diversity, just difference, just willy-nilly. But we know that when we talk about diversity today, it tends to be much more specific than just talking about difference. You can talk about a diversity of mushrooms, but notice that you're already imagining that the word ends in ie rather than y, and it's probably in some ancient book that's falling apart. When we think about diversity, we are generally thinking about affirmative action policies, about even racial preference policies. And so, within the controversies over that, there is often someone who will say, well, you know, if we're looking for diversity, then what about Mormons and people from Idaho and somebody who has only one leg? What about that diversity? But no, we, we all know that what diversity means, in code, is Black Americans, Latinos and also Native Americans. That's what diversity policies are usually aimed at. And to be an American person is to know that that is the meaning that diversity has specified into. It’s narrowed.
And you know what's diverse in the real sense, as in the original sense, Beauty and the Beast, the Disney movie musical. And you know it's diverse when it's in Dutch. Yes. I spent about 15 minutes in Holland way back in 1992. And of course, when I was there, I wanted to at least be able to fake speaking Dutch. I could have a really, really bad conversation for about three minutes of the time I was there. And the way I learned it mostly was by listening to the Dutch soundtrack of the then new musical film, Beauty and the Beast over and over. This is the bon jour. And since this is so popular, most of you probably know basically what the words are. But yes, in the Netherlands, they dub these things — things like this, where kids, you know, they don't know English yet and so you have to do it in Dutch — and I enjoyed listening to it in Dutch. So here it goes.
MUSIC: Belle from Beauty and the Beast (in Dutch)
Daar gaat de bakker — there goes the baker — see how Dutch and English are related?
CRITICAL RACE THEORY’S ORIGINS AS LEGAL THEORY
Let's get back to what we were talking about. So words’ meanings are always changing. Words’ meanings are getting more specific. Now, there's a term that we're using lately as if those two, frankly rather obvious, things weren't true. And that term is, get ready for it: critical race theory. We really need just some simple perspectives from linguistics to cut through a lot of one of the weirdest, messiest controversies I've seen in a long time, because nobody quite understands what the other person is talking about. And so critical race theory begins with obscure legal theory articles a good 35, 40 years ago. And they had a particular subject matter. They were about reconceiving our sense of how society works on the basis of power relations, which are so entrenched that we might reconsider the very philosophical foundations of the republic. That is one of the arguments in this body of work. And this body of work was, as legal scholarship, also about how we might reconceive our very notion of what justice is. So this is law school stuff. This is legal scholarship and it was titled Critical Race Theory. Now, today we're hearing that critical race theory is being used in schools and it's something quite different from what these legal papers were about because critical race theory has come to refer to different things than it happened to in, for example, 1985. This is what happens. So Democratic doesn't mean today what it meant in 1920. Diversity today doesn't mean what it meant as recently as, say, 1975. Critical race theory — what we mean by that has extended from what it originally meant into something that is different, related, but different.
IS CRT BEING TAUGHT TO SCHOOLCHILDREN?
So to take an extreme, and this is an extreme, there are schools where people are teaching a way of looking at things that's rooted in critical race theory, but certainly is not about exposing nine or 12 or even 15 year olds to articles written for legal scholars decades ago. But for example, there's the Dalton School in New York City and there is an anonymous letter from parents where they describe the sort of thing that has been going on at that particular school. It's something different from preaching from legal articles. So, quote:
Every class this year has had an obsessive focus on race and identity, racist cop reenactments in science, decentering whiteness in art class, learning about white supremacy and sexuality in health class. In place of a joyful progressive education, students are exposed to an excessive focus on skin color and sexuality before they even understand what sex is. Children are bewildered or bored after hours of discussing these topics in the new long format classes.
Now, that's not happening everywhere, but it is a useful peek at what is alarming many parents. What we have to understand is that when that is called critical race theory, we're talking about what that term has come to apply to in the wake of the original articles, but it doesn't refer any
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