--- title: The Conservative Case Against Banning Critical Race Theory description: The conservative push to ban critical race theory rests on idea that speech should be curtailed because it makes some people uncomfortable canonical: https://time.com/6079716/conservative-case-against-banning-critical-race-theory/ author: Aziz Huq article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2021-07-13T11:00:35.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:51:55.291Z article:section: Ideas og:title: The Conservative Case Against Banning Critical Race Theory og:description: The conservative push to ban critical race theory rests on idea that speech should be curtailed because it makes some people uncomfortable og:url: https://time.com/6079716/conservative-case-against-banning-critical-race-theory/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt354a0421e27a4be0/698a1aff656a3f9bcebdb6d8/conservatives-critical-race-theory.jpeg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1024 og:image:height: 576 og:image:alt: Texas State Legislature Continues Work On Bills During Special Session og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Conservative Case Against Banning Critical Race Theory twitter:description: The conservative push to ban critical race theory rests on idea that speech should be curtailed because it makes some people uncomfortable twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt354a0421e27a4be0/698a1aff656a3f9bcebdb6d8/conservatives-critical-race-theory.jpeg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The Conservative Case Against Banning Critical Race Theory > Sponsored content. 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A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-inside-2026q3/newsletters?i=d8658bdc-e857-4f04-9025-435e5ac17700&cr=time-nl-inside-2026q3-v1) ## Video: The History You Didn't Learn: Black Wall Streets [Watch (HLS stream): The History You Didn't Learn: Black Wall Streets](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/W3Zny2Gh.m3u8) (10:26)  _Published 2021-05-28. It's been 100 years since the Tulsa race massacre, when an angry white mob destroyed a prosperous black neighborhood in Tulsa Oklahoma. But Tulsa's story is part of a larger history of Black Wall Streets that existed in many American cities._ by [Aziz Huq](https://time.com/author/aziz-huq/) ## Aziz Huq Jul 13, 2021 11:00 AM UTC  Members of the House Select Committee on Constitutional Rights and Remedies are gathered for hearings on bail reform and election integrity bills at the Texas State Capitol on July 10, 2021 in Austin, Texas. Lawmakers are using a special session of the 87th Legislature to work through a list of priorities set by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott which include overhauling the states voting laws, bail reform, border security, social media censorship, and critical race theory. Members of the House Select Committee on Constitutional Rights and Remedies are gathered for hearings on bail reform and election integrity bills at the Texas State Capitol on July 10, 2021 in Austin, Texas. Lawmakers are using a special session of the 87th Legislature to work through a list of priorities set by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott which include overhauling the states voting laws, bail reform, border security, social media censorship, and critical race theory. Tamir Kalifa/Getty Images by [Aziz Huq](https://time.com/author/aziz-huq/) ## Aziz Huq Jul 13, 2021 11:00 AM UTC By [the end of June](https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/map-where-critical-race-theory-is-under-attack/2021/06), 29 Republican-led state legislatures had considered and nine had enacted laws to penalize schools or teachers [teaching critical race theory](https://time.com/6075193/critical-race-theory-debate/) (CRT). Whether or not such laws would stifle anything taught in public schools today is uncertain because existing legislative control over curricula is already extensive. But the war against CRT is spilling into new arenas: Florida’s [anti-CRT](https://www.fldoe.org/newsroom/latest-news/governor-ron-desantis-signs-legislation-to-set-the-pace-for-civics-education-in-america.stml) law forces colleges to survey how “competing ideas and perspectives” are presented, [threatening](https://nypost.com/2021/06/23/florida-to-require-university-faculty-students-to-be-surveyed-on-beliefs/) funding cuts if a university is “indoctrinating.” A paradox lies at this largely conservative campaign against CRT. If you slice through the rhetoric, it rests on a view of free speech that the political right, until now, stridently and correctly rejected: That speech can and should be curtailed because it makes some people feel uncomfortable or threatened. As a result, perhaps the most powerful argument against CRT’s critics is located on the political right, particularly in a recent [opinion](https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/20-255%5Fg3bi.pdf) by Justice Samuel Alito, one of the most conservative members of the Supreme Court. Consider first how varied and inconsistent the portrayals of CRT on offer are. The Republic Study Committee [defines](https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000017a-3f65-d283-a3fb-bf6f99470000) CRT as a belief in “racial essentialism.” In contrast, Ellie Krasne of the Heritage Foundation [postulates](https://www.heritage.org/civil-society/commentary/how-leftists-critical-race-theory-poisons-our-discussion-racism) that CRT is “rooted in Marxism,” and so defines race as “a social construct, enforced by those in power (white men).” Similarly, the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo [talks](https://www.city-journal.org/how-to-fight-critical-race-theory) of CRT as “identity-based Marxism.” He detects it whenever terms such as “social justice” and “diversity and inclusion” are used, and so sees it “permeat\[ing\] the collective intelligence and decision-making process of American government” in advance of a socialist uprising. Turn to the newly-minted laws, and one finds yet other, quite different depictions. Florida’s, for example, [defines](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/06/florida-critical-race-theory-ban-what-it-tells-us-about-anti-anti-racism.html) it as any “theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice.” Idaho’s [characterizes](https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/27/us/critical-race-theory-idaho-bill-trnd/index.html) CRT as teaching that treats people as “inherently responsible for actions committed in the past by other members of the same … race.” These definitions of CRT can’t be reconciled. None offer clear guiderails to what precisely it means to ban CRT—No more talk of race as an identity? No discussion of laws or institutions that create racial stratification? Taken literally, some of the definitions also extend absurdly far. Florida’s could prohibit Nobel Prize-winning University of Chicago economist Gary Becker’s [work](https://review.chicagobooth.edu/magazine/winter-2014/how-gary-becker-saw-the-scourge-of-discrimination) on discrimination, because Becker identifies market concentration and education (not “merely” prejudice) as causal predicates of discrimination. Perhaps it’s a mistake to look for a stable definition of CRT threading together the case against it. For at the core of the case against CRT is instead the simple idea that people shouldn’t be made to feel uncomfortable about their advantages or others’ disadvantages. This is a version of the “[belief](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886902000727?casa%5Ftoken=zkx57JeEJUIAAAAA:dT9v2IGOQgBimnH50dOKYzTGYagTMlcW-c0635o80UMhGZxTqzxISZOan%5FBsZdxUnj9DKsK70w) in a just world” that psychologists long ago identified. But here it has a partisan edge: it is about appealing to people—especially those in “[swing districts](https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/24/culture-war-critical-race-theory-496087)” targeted by Republicans in 2022—who feel unease in their present relative advantage, but find it costly to dissect such discomfort. Both the Idaho and the Florida laws target suggestions that someone should be responsible for disadvantages now faced by Blacks and other minorities, beyond a narrowly defined coterie of ‘bad’ discriminators. Similarly, Krasne centrally objects to being made to feel that she is “an enemy of all that is good.” Rufo complains in a similar vein about people having to write “letters of apology”—since whites have nothing to feel culpable about. As one (white) letter writer to the _Laconia Daily Sun_ plaintively [said](https://www.laconiadailysun.com/opinion/letters%5Fto%5Feditor/roger-davis-advantages-available-in-america-to-everyone-regardless-of-race/article%5F962bfe30-cd63-11eb-926d-27a6a289af3b.html), the problem with CRT is that it surfaces the possibility of “systems and rules that work in my favor, benefiting me every day, month and year, that are not available to anyone else in America.” Indeed. The case against CRT, in short, is not about a fixed set of ideas. It is about wanting to avoid certain feelings of discomfort or even shame. But the right has encountered this idea before—and seemed not to like it. Until recently, commentators on the political right have [claimed](https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-free-speech-campus-liberals) that universities are captured by “leftist” students who “[don’t think much](https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/2020/10/23/George-Leef-Free-speech-is-embattled-on-campus/stories/202010230040)” about free speech, [or](https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-wild-world-of-oppression-studies) who “don’t want to be bothered anymore by ideas that offend them.” A “jargon of safety” in universities, complained commentator [Megan McCardle](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-08-13/sheltered-students-go-to-college-avoid-education), is then used to “silence” those who don’t agree. Conservatives disparage arguments made by “snowflake” college students. But the case against CRT is made of the same stuff. As such, it is subject to the same response. Hence, in a recent opinion concerning off-campus student speech, Justice Alito explained why a student’s crude rant about being excluded from a cheerleading squad could not be punished in simple terms: “Speech cannot be suppressed just because it expresses thoughts or sentiments that others find upsetting.” This is indeed the law: The Supreme Court has not allowed the state to prohibit or punish speech because it riles up an audience since [1951](https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/340us315). The idea that audience discomfort provides a justification for censorship, that is, is at profound odds with our free speech tradition. The case against CRT shows why: Because it turns on how an audience feels, this argument for speech bans has an indefinite, elastic quality, one that accommodates an endlessly voracious appetite for censoriousness. One of the lessons of the CRT debate, indeed, is that offense can and is taken at indubitably true facts. In many educational contexts, this would mean that either side of a hot-button issue would have the right to shut the other down. Ironically then, if there is a lesson to be learned from the war on CRT, it has nothing to do with how to talk about race—and everything with how the Trumpian revolution continues to devour the principles of American conservatism. ## Transcript The legacies of black wall Street's, it's important for people to remember because there were so many people who have no idea that there were vital Dynamic places where African Americans were living out their vision of the American dream opportunity in Hope and progress of for their community. June 1st 2021 Marcel hundred years since the Tulsa Race Massacre, as many as 300, people were killed as an angry white mob, destroyed a prosperous black neighborhood in Tulsa. Oklahoma once known as that City's Black Wall Street story is part of a larger history of segregated prosperity in many American cities around the turn of the century. So ask Jim Crow begins to really take shape and African-Americans are forced into segregated parts of the city. These communities rise up in places like Durham North Carolina and Little Rock Arkansas, Jackson, Mississippi, and people began to notice that up there all kinds of businesses and services that grow there. And so they kind of take on the name Black Wall Street. One of the biggest and longest lasting black wall. Street's was in Richmond. Virginia. A neighborhood called Jackson Ward. So the factors that led to Richmond's being the cradle of black capitalism, lay in the diverse slave economy, that existed at that time. So you had African American who were involved and not just agricultural slavery but also an urban and Industrial slavery end after the Civil War II. Had this concentrated community of African Americans who have been working in the city in factories and it feels and rural areas around Richmond has continued to build the institutions and the community and the neighborhood that they had begun even before the war. And then you begin to have a lot of really important, but natural first, such as insurance companies and Banks, which really highlight Richmond as the first Black Wall Street. One of the most storied figures in Jackson Ward history was a banker and business woman named Maggie Lena Walker. You cannot study magazine Walker and not be fascinated you do with her, she was born in slaved in 1864 on, right? Towards the end of the Civil War, and really saw economic empowerment of African American women as the path forward Locker started, her banking career at a mutual Aid Society, called The Independent order of St, Luke 1867 St. Luke was established to help freed slaves. Gain economic independence in 1901 and she said, I'm specifically talking to the women here. Look, good women here. Whose money is in this organization and she was able to bring that Vision to fruition in 1903. When she became the first black woman Bank president. St. Luke Penny Savings Bank. Later named the Consolidated Bank and Trust was acquired in 2005, but Walker's home in Jackson. Ward is still standing. As you see around me, the homes have been restored on the outside while mrs. Walker's home. It's been restored to its full Glory as much as we could using artifacts that belong to Maggie Walker and her family, because we still get a lot of people who come in and do our chores, and they are still amazing. Why didn't I know about her before? Why have I not heard the story? And it is a story that has been preserved quite fully in Richmond itself, but not so much across the country. What is happening now in Jacksonville? Or is that those who remember, the stories are coming together to make sure that they are no longer for God neighborhood? We not look as it did when she walks these streets, but the memories are still there. In his Heyday, I imagine that it was a fabulous to live and Jackson board that you needed. You could get your in Jackson Ward, and I will just say walking into the st. Luke Bank on, I think had to be a treat. First of all, making me walk or made sure that he was beautifully appointed with mahogany and marble and I can just imagine a made of domestic. I'm working in a white person's home in another part of the city and she walks into the bank. And she's greeted probably didn't, but by not just her first name, but she's call miss or missus, and I just can't imagine that it is height Jackson, Ward was an incredible experience, but then there's also the dark side and that is that it is a segregated community. Magalina Walker accommodate segregation by real ending mostly in the segregated areas. Are so there I think in the midst of this in affluent and its dynamism. There's always that dark cloud of racism in Jim Crow that kind of just outside there is a a world that wants to continue to treat them as second-class Citizens. Jackson word with a Haven for black business for many years but like Tulsa was Black Wall Street. It to you came to an end, the difference between the end of Jackson, Ward, and the end of Tulsa, is really a difference in degree. And so for Jackson, Ward, it was more of a slow death. A wide range of factors caused Jackson Ward's, economic decline, including redlining, which kept Capital out of black neighborhoods, slum clearance, where City's raise old buildings without rebuilding in certain areas and a highway system that cut right through the neighborhood. But the final end to Jackson Ward's. Black Wall Street days, came on the heels of the civil rights movement and desegregation. So ironically at the very time that you begin to have opportunity at least legally for African Americans to have equal accommodation, to be able to get you no equal access to education is at the same time that these communities have been so undermined in the decades previous and so when they have choices to make, they in a move to the suburbs and the Really the most vulnerable and needy living in places like Jackson Ward. The occurrence of diminishing. Black wealth has a long history in our country. I mean really takes root in slavery. There you have hundreds and hundreds of years of unpaid black labor, and then be disenfranchised and their wealthy undermined and other ways. I think that we just really have to deal with this long-standing American exploitation of African Americans. You can go to your bank tomorrow and you can say until you as a corporation start to speak on our behalf. I want all my money in recent years, there has been a movement to reinvest funds into black Banks and businesses. One of the organizations advocating for this financial shift is Bank Black USA which helps people find and invest in Black banks for people to move their money from the larger institutions that had it. Maybe a history of discriminatory practices and predatory lending practices and move that money to in the eyes with their minority depository Institution. According to the FDIC mdi's are more likely to lend to lower and moderate-income communities and help promote economic viability in these areas, found out that black financial institutions are under supported in under capitalize, right? Black banks are in Decline. For example, there was like, Fifty of these institutions in 2001 and 2021 and very nearly 20, our solution was to create resources for people to be able to compare the banks and services, and financial help the community impact it. Because we do believe that these empty eyes. Can you play an integral role in closing that racial wealth Gap with the support? It if you don't learn about the origin and history of Blackwell, you'll fall into the Trap of thinking that there was no, Blackwell. The time to learn about Jackson would take time to learn about Durham a time to learn about Tulsa. Let's ring the stories for word, and remember those times of black Excellence, it can come again, if we follow the road now cuz they said before us, ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6079716/conservative-case-against-banning-critical-race-theory/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6079716/conservative-case-against-banning-critical-race-theory/"},"headline":"The Conservative Case Against Banning Critical Race Theory","datePublished":"2021-07-13T11:00:35.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:51:55.291Z","description":"The conservative push to ban critical race theory rests on idea that speech should be curtailed because it makes some people uncomfortable","url":"https://time.com/6079716/conservative-case-against-banning-critical-race-theory/","keywords":["politics"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt354a0421e27a4be0/698a1aff656a3f9bcebdb6d8/conservatives-critical-race-theory.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Aziz Huq","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/aziz-huq/"}],"articleSection":"Ideas","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt354a0421e27a4be0/698a1aff656a3f9bcebdb6d8/conservatives-critical-race-theory.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Texas State Legislature Continues Work On Bills During Special Session","caption":"Texas State Legislature Continues Work On Bills During Special Session","creditText":"Tamir Kalifa/Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/ideas/","name":"Ideas"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/politics/","name":"politics"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/6079716/conservative-case-against-banning-critical-race-theory/","name":"The Conservative Case Against Banning Critical Race Theory"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"The History You Didn't Learn: Black Wall Streets","description":"It's been 100 years since the Tulsa race massacre, when an angry white mob destroyed a prosperous black neighborhood in Tulsa Oklahoma. 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