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58 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 551 (2023)
Anti-"CRT," a Century Old Tradition

handle is hein.journals/hcrcl58 and id is 559 raw text is: Anti-CRT, A Century Old Tradition Aziz Rana* ABSTRACT In the aftermath of racial justice protests, the country has witnessed a wave of conservative anti-critical race theory (CRT) legislation. This essay argues that such legislation is best understood as the latest iteration of a long-standing reactionary political practice. This practice goes back a century to World War I and the 1920s. Then, as now, it was marked by two critical elements: an argu- ment about national identity and a focus on public schools. In the early twentieth century, conservatives began systematically fusing ethno-racial claims about Anglo-European cultural distinctiveness with a self-consciously universal lan- guage of the United States as a uniquely free and equal society. They further contended that public schools were failing to adequately teach children in the nation's true values and called for a series of school measures with uncanny resemblances to the present. In exploring this pre-history of today's attacks on public schools, the essay teases out why arguments akin to anti- CRT claims initially emerged and recur whenever there have been major flashpoints around cultural and national iden- tity. It also highlights a seemingly paradoxical phenomenon: In the United States, the most prominent defenses of racial hierarchy and attacks on racial reform often speak in a civic and ostensibly universal register rather than in an ethnic nationalist one. This fact requires Americans to confront the embed- ded drawbacks of longstanding and taken-for-granted narratives of national purpose, narratives commonly invoked across the political spectrum. INTRODUCTION: UNIVERSALISM IN THE POLITICS OF RACIAL REACTION ..................................................... 552 I. RECONSTRUCTING WHITE SUPREMACY THROUGH THE LANGUAGE OF THE CREED. ..................................... 555 A. Frederick Douglass and the Radical Side of Creedal N ationalism ......................................... 555 B. The Domestication of an Anti-Slavery Politics in the Turn to World War I ................................. 557 II. 1920s SOCIAL CONFLICT AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS ............ .561 A. Fears of Demographic and Cultural Transformation.... 561 B. Public Schools as a New Battleground ................ 565 III. ANTI-CRT BILLS IN THE 1920s ........................ 567 A. Book Bans and Parental Enforcement ................. 567 * Aziz Rana is the Provost's Distinguished Fellow at Boston College for 2023-2024 and will be the J. Donald Monan, SJ, Chair in Law and Government at Boston College beginning in 2024. Many thanks to the editors of the Harvard Civil Liberties-Civil Rights Law Review for their excellent editorial assistance. This essay can be thought of as a development of an earlier article, Aziz RANA, CONSTITUTIONALISM AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF THn SECURITY STATE, 103 CALIF. L. REV. 335, 335-86 (2015). It incorporates language from that article and extends ideas and examples discussed there, including some 1920s school legislations efforts, applying them now to the emergent debates over anti-CRT.

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