(upbeat music) - Welcome to Forum 360.

I'm Stephanie York, your host today.

Thank you for joining us for a global outlook with a local view.

Today we're talking to Brant Lee, Juris Doctor, professor, and Assistant Dean for the Diversity and Social Justice Initiatives at the University of Akron School of Law.

And we're going to be discussing the hot button topic of critical race theory, what it is and what it isn't.

Professor Lee is currently teaching a course that's open to the public, and covers both the historical role of law in creating inequality, and the current role of law in exasperating, maintaining, and alleviating it.

With his background, I'm looking forward to this conversation about critical race theory.

Welcome Professor Lee, and thank you for joining us today.

- Well thank you so much for having me.

- Absolutely.

- Really a pleasure to be here.

- Yes, it's a pleasure to have you.

If you would, could you tell me a little bit about yourself, your background, where you grew up, and where you went to school, things like that.

- So I am a fifth generation San Franciscan.

- [Stephanie] Really?

- Right, yeah.

My great great grandfather came in 1856.

And I have been in Akron, Ohio for the last 25 years.

- Okay, so you're almost a full Akronite.

- Yes, yes.

So yeah, I now say I'm from Akron, although it still sounds funny coming out of my mouth.

I went to public schools in San Francisco.

And I went to the University of California at Berkeley for my undergraduate degree.

And then I had a joint degree in law and public policy from Harvard, which is where I met Marie.

So, and I worked a couple of jobs.

I was, I did political work in DC for a while.

I worked for a private firm in San Francisco.

And then I started to be on the law teaching track.

- Very good.

So you teach a class now that's open to the public.

Tell us about that.

And like, I mean, I hear that the numbers registered are really astronomical for a course.

- Well, so at the end of last summer, 2020, and that was the summer of Black Lives Matter and George Floyd, and every institution was thinking what can we do about racial inequality?

And my Dean came to me and said, "Maybe we should offer a course to the public for free."

And I said, "Fine, I'll teach that."

Right, and we thought we would get, you know, 50 to 100, and we'd get some, (coughing) excuse me, some publicity.

You know, the second day that the signups were available, it was already over 1,000.

And we had to pause the registrations to check with IT to make sure, like, can we handle this many people, right?

- [Stephanie] Did you think there was an error?

- Well, you know, we had been planning to use WebEx, which was our normal classroom teaching thing, but WebEx can not that many people.

So we were like, how are we going to do this?

But they figured out a way to do it.

And so we opened it back up.

And last year, by the time we cut it off, we had 5,900 people signed up for this class.

And we went for 12 weeks, one hour a week.

And this year we decided, I decided to teach it one more time.

But I wasn't sure, you know, whether we had used up all our, like everyone who might've wanted to take it, took it already, but we have another 5,000.

- I can't believe this.

So 10,000 people you have taught this class to.

And are you seeing a wide age range?

Can you tell that or?

- You know, I had them do a survey, and it's really diverse in some ways, and sort of surprisingly not in others.

And the years are different.

So last year it was about 75%, 70% white.

And this year it's more like 45.

So a little bit more Black or African American this year.

Really wide age range.

I mean, so this was hard, made it hard to teach the class because I had professors of African American history and judges taking the class.

And then also my mom, you know?

(Brant laughing) Or the guy that I know as a high school band parent, who thought, oh, you're taking it, I'll take it.

- So you had all these different levels of education, and backgrounds, and knowledge.

And you had to, I don't want to say dumb it down, but dumb it down for some, and speed it up for others.

- Well right, how do you say something that's relevant to everybody sort of regardless of how much background they have?

- Well, it must've worked, because you have such, you're very highly, it's a very highly popular.

- Yes.

I think this year we ended up with a lot of word of mouth.

- Yes.

So I want to talk about critical race theory now, what it is and what it is not.

There's so much confusion surrounding this hot button topic.

So let's start at the beginning.

How would you define critical race theory?

- So I would, I'm gonna say two different kinds of definitions, right?

- Okay.

- Because there's sort of a historical, technical, this is what people have meant in history when they say critical race theory, right.

Because a bunch of law professors, mostly African American, or Asian, or Hispanic, actually, there were some variety right from the very beginning who, you know, even in the 70s, but mostly more in the 80s, started to write from a perspective that was sort of analyzing the traditional legal analysis of race discrimination, right, and criticizing it, like this is not really working.

This is not really describing our lives, right?

And they sort of roughly were kind of in a group, they recognized that other people were writing a similar thing.

And then the name critical race theory really took off when they had a workshop, right.

And the workshop, an the academic workshop is, you know, 12 law professors getting together, you know, at it for a weekend.

- [Stephanie] Like a retreat.

- Like a retreat, right.

And comparing and, you know, sharing ideas and sharing papers, right.

So that's a very kind of academic thing to do.

And then, and that was the Critical Race Theory Workshop.

And that's sort of when the names sort of solidified, right, and got a little bit more formal.

And then, you know, somewhere along the way, someone wrote, some of the key people involved in it edited a book, "Critical Race Theory."

And they put excerpts from all these law review articles that people have been writing.

And then, and so that was it, right?

That, I mean, it did grow in popularity, even sort of within the legal academy.

I myself was a law professor, and went to the 10 year anniversary, right, of the Critical Legal Theory workshop.

And even in law school, I was a research assistant for Derrick Bell, who is kind of considered one of the founders of critical race theory.

- Okay, so you really are intimate with this subject.

- Yeah, but so it's an academic thing, right?

And so when people say critical race theory is being taught in schools.

- Yes.

- I'm like, I kind of doubt it.

I don't think they're assigning law review articles to elementary school students, right?

Not even most law students, right, are exposed to- - Right, I was not exposed to it in law school.

I think you came in when I left, and you're probably the one teaching it.

So, so yes.

So that's kind of the origin of critical race theory too.

It's mostly an academic context, right?

So what does critical race theory say?

- So, you know, so if you ever are familiar with sort of an academic movement, right.

There's not, they're not organized, there's no organization, which is the Critical Race Theory Inc, right?

- [Stephanie] Right.

- And so that means there's no definition that everybody would agree to.

And academics, our whole job is to nitpick.

Right, so if you put three people, the editors of the critical race theory book into a room, there would be 10 things that they disagreed about with each other about what critical race theory was.

No, I don't really think it's that.

So that's why it's so, you know, when I hear other people saying, "Well, this is what it is."

I'm like, nobody else has ever has ever been able to, right.

So having said all that, though, it is fair to say, well then why do you even call yourself one thing?

There is a core.

And the core, I think is that in lots of different ways and in different directions, these law professors were seeing that as a way that American law treats race, or treats discrimination, didn't address some of the harms that they were seeing.

So let me just, just as an example, right, in American law, typically you have to, you have to find specific, intentional discrimination, conscious racism in order to find that there's some kind of violation.

And you can infer it from facts, but you have to find that.

And you know, if you're a person of color, and your kids are in lousy schools, or your teenagers are being arrested at a high rate, you don't especially care whether we can track that down to one person being racist.

It's not any consolation to you when you get arrested that, you know.

- For apparently no reason.

- Well, so, I mean, even if there's a reason, let's say you're arrested on the street corner for selling drugs.

And the reason you're being arrested is because the police officers are patrolling the street corners and not the dorm rooms.

But you're still arrested and you still get a record.

And the fact that you can't point to an individual to say, oh, you were racist, that doesn't help you.

And, you know, so maybe there's no particular racist police officer in that instance, but why are we patrolling the street corners and dorm rooms, right?

That's the sort of background idea.

So critical race theorists picked up ideas like that, sort of, you know, again, from a huge variety of perspectives.

Some people, I think, early on, they were telling stories, they were doing fiction, and they got a lot of criticism because it's anecdotal.

That's not replicable.

That's, you know, how can we test whether this is true?

And I think that what they were doing is, you know, you don't always have the language when you're seeing something that the world is not.

Everything's put in terms of what you've been taught, what the, right?

- Yes.

- So sometimes you don't have the language to articulate the theory of what you're seeing, but you can at least say, well, this is what it feels like.

This just doesn't seem like you're capturing, you know, what is going on in our lives.

So, I think that it's just a way of sharing our perspective.

For people of color to say, this is what law looks like to us.

And some of it was very critical.

- So, critical race theory has been studying whiteness too, not just the African American or Asian perspectives, you know, other perspectives, with a fair amount of sympathy.

- [Brant] Yes.

- Tell me about that, 'cause that's very interesting to me.

- Yes, that's a relatively recent turn in critical race theory.

But, I think the core of it is this, you know, when you think about inequality, because we all know that there's persistent racial inequality along any number of measures, right, wealth, or health, or education, or whatever.

And you're trying to figure out well why that is.

And historically for a very long time, we have, as a society, the mainstream narrative has been, let's look at the Black people and say, why are they deficient in some way?

And if you are really racist, the old fashioned way, you say it's genetic, right?

But then there are softer versions that say, oh, it's because of education, or culture, or norms.

But still the focus is, where's the problem in that community?

- Right.

- Right?

And the shifting the focus to whiteness says, well, wait a minute, you know, why do we, why are we pointing at that?

Why don't we look at inequality?

Why don't we look right in both directions and say, well, what's going on with white people?

Why are they doing better?

And so some of it is, you know, is where the language about privilege comes up.

- Yes.

- Right?

- Yes, yes.

- But some of that, the part that's sympathetic is, you know, so then you go a little bit deeper and you say, well, why did government, when white people were the people making the decisions in government, why did they make this decisions to set up the schools in this way, or to make these rules about housing in this way, or to make the zoning rules in this particular way, that segregated communities?

And so it's sympathetic because you know, some of these new accounts are saying, are looking at what was going on in the lives of white people at a particular time.

Because if you are, for instance, if you are from the south, and the civil rights era is coming, and you have a society that's built up based on certain premises, and there's just lots of things that fall away that you've been relying on and just taken for granted your whole life.

Right?

- Yes.

- And there's, and the reason I feel like it's kind of sympathetic is, you know, so there's a recent book about called "Dying of Whiteness."

Which is, which says, there's some issues that people have sort of latched on to and said, this is our cultural issue that we're gonna defend to the death.

And it's things like gun control.

When you turn around and look, and you see that white people are the people dying from suicide and household incidents more, right?

- Oh, right.

- Right?

Or you look at healthcare, and the objection to expanding Medicaid to in your state.

The objection to it is that there's too much government, and that helps lazy people.

And in your mind, you know, in the states, they think of that, it's connected to race.

So then they don't adopt Medicaid because they don't want to let go of that status difference.

And then, I mean, there's a lot of poor white people in those states, and they're not getting Medicaid either.

- Absolutely.

- Right?

So there's sort of this, it's really tragic.

It's this way in which this sort of decision that's about discrimination is hurting yourself.

- Yes.

- Right?

So that's what some of this is about.

- So I'd like to remind our viewers, and those who may have joined late, that we're here with Brant Lee, Professor of the Akron School of Law.

We're diving into the aspects of critical race theory, what it is, what it is not, and why so many people are concerned and anxious about it, really.

I've got to tell you, it certainly has made local school boards anxious, as parents come out on both sides of this issue.

So tell me, why are people so concerned that it's being taught in their high school, in their middle school?

- So, you know, the concern is so widespread.

I mean, the temptation for me, because I know about the background, is to sort of dismiss and say, they just don't know what they're talking about.

This is not critical race theory.

But the concern is so widespread that it's clear that a lot of people are concerned about something.

So what is it?

- I mean, they're storming school boards.

- Yes, right.

So set aside whether they're getting the name right, or they're getting the history right.

That doesn't really matter.

- Yeah, what are they concerned about?

- What are they worried about?

So, you know, my view of it is that there's a minor thing, and then there's a major thing.

- Okay.

- The minor thing is, it is absolutely true that there are diversity trainings that are done poorly, right?

- Sure.

- There are, I mean, there are any kinds.

- There are good law professors, there are bad law professors.

There's good doctors, there's bad doctors.

- You know, and I can tell you, you know, my social studies teacher who read us the text out of the book, that was our class.

Like, that was not well taught.

But so people who are objecting are objecting to that in a way where they felt like they were singled out and persecuted during a training, which I have seen happen, that does happen.

- Specifically that white people are being singled out.

- Specifically white people, right.

- You're bad.

You're racist.

You've always been racist.

- Right, and so, like I said, I do think that there are people who have said things like that, right?

Or have that said to them.

And so they're laying this on, they're laying that experience on this.

But the bigger picture, I mean, like we said, there's bad people teaching everything, we don't throw out economics, because I had a lousy economics professor.

The bigger thing is that America's changing.

So, you know, some of the complaints are, you're teaching our children that we're racist.

And, you know, some of the children are learning a different history than we learned.

- Right.

- Right?

I mean, I learned for instance, that, you know, after the Civil War, there was a brief period of reconstruction, and then the federal government pulled out because, I don't know what you remember.

What I remember is the northerners were drunk, scallywags.

They were corrupt, and the Black people could not govern themselves.

And that's why that reconstruction fell apart.

And the soldiers pulled out.

Reconstruction ended, you know, reconstruction was a time of thriving for Black people.

And sometimes we skip that over.

They voted, they started businesses, they were entrepreneurs, they got elected to, there were two senators from the south during reconstruction.

- Okay.

- Right?

And that all got torn down through violence.

So when the federal government pulled out, the southern states were at the mercy of, you know, there's no way to sugarcoat this, sort of lawless white mobs who, in some places, in North Carolina, in Wilmington, they had elected, I think it was a Black mayor and a Black police chief, and they, because they were in coalition with poor white people, they were called deffusionists.

And they got elected and they swept in the office, and a mob of 500 armed white people, at the point of the gun, they resigned, it was a coup on American soil.

They just overthrew that government, and chased them out of town.

And that happened all through the south.

And, you know, so during reconstruction, Black people were voting at great rates.

And, you know, by the turn of the century, it was down to virtually zero, just because of intimidation.

- Wow.

- So if you learn that, instead of what we learned, you will have a little bit of a different view about what American government has been like.

- Absolutely, I mean, I didn't know that.

- Right?

So, you know, so there's a little bit of truth to the fact that your kids are gonna see the world, particularly with regard to race differently than you did if they're learning this stuff.

But what they're learning, it's not because there's some ideologues saying, I'm gonna teach you all that, white people are all evil.

- Are bad.

- Right?

It's just because we are learning more about telling the other side of the story.

- Why is it so hard for people to hear the other side of the story?

I mean, what are parents scared of?

I don't, that's where I don't understand, I guess, are they threatened?

- You know, it's that, so change is hard, right?

And it's really messy.

So some of these bad trainings they're coming, because I think, I don't want to, you know, psychoanalyze people that I don't really know, but those, you know, we've been decades with one side of the story not being told, and not being taught.

And then just really in the last 20 years, there have been several popular books, right, that are coming out that are explaining a lot of this other side of the story.

And so, you know, with all of that pent up frustration, then you're gonna unteach that, that's kind of the goal of diversity training, is to tell the other side.

And so some of the people, some people have been so frustrated for so long, it comes out really forcefully.

It comes out in a way that it's not necessarily always untrue, but not framed in a way that people are gonna be able to listen.

So it's sort of a little bit more of an attack.

Which is what you do when you're really frustrated, and it's been a long time.

So that's some of the messiness.

But you asked why people have such trouble.

There is a difficult question to be answered here, which is, who are we?

What's the national narrative of America?

And for a long time, it's been kind of settled that America, there's this brilliant idea at the founding of the nation that brought a new thing, democracy.

No more kings to the world.

And that, although there were flaws, they were small, and we overcame them over time.

That's the story, a narrative of America.

And if you go back at every step of that narrative, like those flaws were not little.

If you're Black slavery, is not just a little thing.

Which the constitution accepted for almost 100 years.

So like the founding fathers, not so great to you.

Reconstruction, just as like we were saying, not really so great.

And then we're now into the 20th century, 4,000 lynchings took place in the first half of the 20th century.

Public, with police officers either complicit or standing by, and in some cases, like the whole town showing up like it was a picnic.

And taking pictures with the corpse, and making postcards.

And that was happening through the first half of the 20th century.

- That's appalling to people now.

- Yes, appalling, right?

- But that was normal.

- That's part of the history.

I mean, I learned that the great migration was all about industrialization and jobs.

- Yes, right.

- Right?

- I did.

- Well, you know, I mean, it was about jobs, but it was also about fleeing terror.

Because those were the days in the south where you couldn't look a white woman in the eye without the possibility of getting lynched.

So that's an atmosphere fear that you're living in that causes you to flee.

I just, I can't take this anymore.

I have to go.

So if you hear that history, then you have to consider maybe the narrative ought to be, I mean, maybe we should try to put ourselves in the shoes of Black people and say, that's our narrative.

It's a narrative of incredible perseverance and continual rebuilding in the face of cyclical, you know, getting beaten down.

That is also a heroic story.

Because I mean, I'm just having read all this stuff, I'm just amazed that people would continually pick themselves up, build a new family, build a new business.

And that is also part of the story.

So we're sort of, those are not very congruent.

And so, and obviously there's a little bit of each that is true, but people are challenging the first.

And if you are, if you feel really tied to that, that general narrative that we all grew up with, then you're threatened by what is being taught.

- Right, and so really, we just need everyone to open up their minds that maybe there are alternate theories.

You don't have to agree with them all.

You don't have to accept them all as fully true, but that may be someone else's living a different narrative than you did.

- Yes.

No, that's right.

And, and, you know, in the end it comes down to some really basic things like empathy.

Can you really put yourselves in the shoes of somebody else whose family has lived through that history?

- Right.

Wow.

Do you think these discussions are productive that are going on in school board meetings right now?

You're teaching critical race theory, I want you to keep doing it.

You're teaching critical race theory, I want you to stop doing it.

I mean, you have people on both sides of the spectrum, but they're really not talking about critical race theory here.

- No.

You know, I mean, from what I've seen at school boards that does not seem productive to me.

People are yelling at each other, they're not really considering, each other's perspective.

They're starting off at such a misinformed place that we can't agree on the language.

I mean, I don't blame school superintendents for saying, you know, rather than defending critical race theory, because you have to study a lot and learn a lot in order to understand how to do it.

I don't blame them for just saying, we don't teach critical race theory.

- And that's what they're saying.

And they aren't teaching critical race theory.

- Well right, not in the specific terms.

- Correct.

- But I mean, they're doing diversity training, which they should.

So that's where the debate is.

- So there's no question that critical race theory is a hot button topic in today's climate.

And I'm so happy that we were able to discuss this issue with Professor Lee today.

Thank you, Professor Lee for joining me today.

I'm Stephanie York.

Thank you for joining us today on Forum 360, for a global outlook with a local view.

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