Abstract
This article offers a semiotic perspective on the debate over critical race theory (CRT) bans in the United States. It presents the debate as unfolding in three stages. In the first stage, CRT is created by an opportunistic journalist as a catchall category for white grievances, and the bans themselves are seen as consistent with freedom of speech, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a colorblind society. A semiotic rupture, occasioned by Timothy Snyder’s 2021, New York Times Magazine article “The War on History is a War on Democracy,” ushered in a second stage. By comparing CRT bans to Vladimir Putin’s use of law to deny Soviet past crimes (especially regarding Ukraine), Snyder exposed the CRT bans as willful acts of forgetting past crimes, while indirectly highlighting Putin’s own anti-woke initiatives. This led to the third stage, in which some CRT ban supporters began to view critical race theory as form of communism. Sometimes this use was tactical; in other instances, it reflected a belief that a conspiracy theory, one consistent with white nationalism, according to which cultural Marxists were destroying American society from within.
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Notes
In what follows, I will generally use “critical race theory” to refer to the intellectual concept that evolved from the 1980s to the present and CRT as the sign used by race reactionaries to silence discussions about systematic racism in the United States.
Fior, Lukin and Martin [13] describe a semiotic explosion as a “moment…when a certain unsuspected event involves a rupture or discontinuity in the causal logic of the story giving rise to change” [13, p. 343]. At the same time, when viewed from the perspective of the past, the event is seen “as the only possible form of development” [13, ibid.]. For example Fior, Lukin and Martin describe how the outbreak of the Ukraine war in February 2022 shattered the previous illusion that war was “virtually impossible”—a view that held sway right up to the moment hostilities began. [13 ibid.] What the Ukraine and Snyder examples share is a sense that, once events have changed on the ground, it is very difficult to return to the previous way of perceiving things.
There is a similar symbolic battle going on over intersectionality, the idea that a person can experience discrimination across multiple identities (for example as African American and female) and that addressing one type of discrimination necessarily leads to taking up other types of discrimination as well. Initially, conservatives largely ignored intersectionality but in recent years the concept has come under fire as “identity politics” and a promoting a “cult of victimhood” [19]. As with CRT, intersectionality has become both a tool to understand the world in which we live and a symbol of white male grievance.
These ideas have continued to influence American legal education. According to an author writing in the American Bar Association journal Human Rights in 2021, the goal of critical race theory is to promote: (1) a recognition that race is socially constructed, (2) a greater appreciation of the normal, embedded nature of racism in American public life, (3) a challenge to notions such as “colorblindness” and “meritocracy” and (4) an appreciation of the lived experiences of people of color [23]. At the same time, the author concedes that critical race theory can “be misunderstood and misapplied” (presumably by supporters) [23]. From a semiotic perspective, this shows how critical race theory/CRT is a malleable symbol that is constantly being (re)negotiated by both friend and foe.
For example, Rufo used fragments of a 900-page curriculum plan to argue that a Los Angeles public school teacher was calling on students to honor an Aztec God of human sacrifice [9]. In another instance, Rufo claimed that an Oregon school district, motivated by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, called on students to denounce the revolution’s enemies and annunciate the “liberated masses’ [9]. According to Sarah Jones, reporting for New York Magazine, the document Rufo offered as proof said nothing of the sort [9].
The structure of the book combines essays on specific topics (“fear”, “dispossession”, “capitalism”) with poetry, and works of fiction by African Americans. Even the essays themselves combine political arguments with stories celebrating African American life [30]. The year 1619 in the title refers to the date the first slaves were brought to colonial America.
These books include On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) and The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe and America (2018) [31].
Snyder records how in 2008 then Russian President Dmitri described the Holodomor as a crime against “the entire Soviet people” [3].
In 2023, Lowry would face accusations from Putin supporting conservatives that his concerns about the “risky proxy war” the United States is fighting in Ukraine, and his call for “a negotiated settlement” were insufficiently critical of the war and overly reliant on a twenty-first century version of the domino theory [38].
Not only that, but Putin could also stand opposed to “Russian Lives Matter,” a group of liberal opponents seeking to call attention to Russian police violence against “ethnic Russians,” complete with dismissive comments about African Americans and a negative comparison between the Euromaidan protesters “who really risk their lives” and Black Lives Matter protesters who do not [39].
For instance, Rafael Kadaris, writing on behalf of Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, while supportive of critical race theory, and firmly opposed to CRT bans, questions “the idea that people of color have a special grasp and authority to speak about issues of race and racism that others don’t have” [48]. Christopher Rufo might find something to agree with here. On the other hand, not all communists take this position. For example, Joel Wendland-Liu noted approvingly that the main tenets of critical race theory were already present in 1964 when Gus Hall, President of the Communist Party of the USA, argued that “white supremacy…is a central pillar in the ideology of U.S. capitalism” [49].
The failure for Antifa to resonate is particularly interesting given the prominent prosecutions of Antifa leaders for protest activities [50].
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Kahn, R. The Moral Panic over CRT Bans: A Semiotic Play in Three Acts. Int J Semiot Law (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-10080-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-10080-5