Republican lawmakers across the country are pushing to ban critical race theory from schools in a giant effort to create a culture war and distract from the fact that what they really want to ban is any teaching about race and racism in the U.S. since the early 1960s. There’s one key question all of these Republicans need to be asked, and Marc Lamont Hill got one of them on his show Black News Tonight and asked it.

The question? “What is critical race theory?”

Hill posed that question to Vernon Jones, a Democrat turned Trump Republican currently running for Georgia governor who has vowed to ban critical race theory, and—as would probably be the case with a minimum 98% of the Republicans vowing to ban critical race theory in schools—Jones had not a clue. He started talking about Christopher Columbus and people who use “their own ideology and their own party affiliation to go to the extreme.”

Hill pressed, because that isn’t a definition of critical race theory.

“Well, first of all, I can tell you, but it’s left up to you to understand,” Jones responded. “I can’t make you understand. The fact is that critical race theory, even on this basis, should not be taught in our schools, period. Now if you can’t understand—”

“But what is it?”

“Well, to me, what it does, to me, my interpretation as well as many others …”

“No, not what it does, what is it? How do you define it? I’m just asking you to define critical race theory because my audience may not know.”

“Well, obviously you don’t know and you haven’t told your audience.”

At this point, Hill’s delighted chuckle and disbelieving “I don’t know?” pointed to the trap he’d sprung. But Jones thought he was winning this exchange and began haranguing Hill to answer the question he himself had started off by asking, becoming increasingly abusive as he mocked the idea that an Ivy League PhD—which Hill has—could be a sign of expertise in the definition of critical race theory. At the point where Jones called him “as dumb as two left shoes,” Hill had his microphone muted, saying “We’re not going to name-call on this show. I have not name-called you, sir. You have come on this show, you’re a Black Republican, I have not called you a name”—and then he went on to list all of the names he had not called Jones, just in case anyone was wondering what it would have looked like if he’d decided to name-call.

“And you’re not going to come on my show and call me dumb,” he concluded. “What I will tell you is that critical race theory is a theory that actually emerged out of critical legal studies. It is a theory that makes an attempt to understand the law through the lens of race and it’s founded on some fundamental presumptions. One is the intractability of race and racism, meaning it’s an intractable problem in America and that we have to use the lens of race to make sense of things. It also is based on the use of counterstories, listening to the, as Derrick Bell, the critical race scholar, said, the voices at the bottom of the well, to make sense of the world and to make sense of the law. These are two big theories, two big pillars of it. And so what we want to do is, if you want to ban it, you have to explain to me why.”

Okay, so Lamont Hill definitely knows what critical race theory is. Shocking from a scholar who’s taught relevant subjects at Temple University, Columbia University, and Morehouse College. But it’s what he said next that really gets to the heart of these efforts to ban critical race studies—not just the reason Jones is joining the trend, but the whole point of the effort.

”But the problem is, all of these Republicans, all of these non-scholars, they say ‘I’m gonna ban critical race theory’ and they can’t answer it. And then [Jones] says, ‘If you can’t answer it then you must not know what it is,’ on some, like, ‘he who smelt it dealt it’ kind of logic. The fact of the matter is, he can’t define it because he don’t know what it is. They look for things to ban to signal to white people ‘Hey, I got your back,’” Hill said. 

”They ban things that aren’t even an issue. There is no public school teacher in America who is attempting to put critical race theory in schools. Critical race theory isn’t even taught in high schools. It’s not even  really taught in college. It is taught in law school and it has increasingly been taught in graduate school.”

Hill directed his closing comments at Jones as a Black Republican—“You want to ban a theory that nobody is trying to bring in in the first place? That is a smoke signal to white America and really to white racists”—but that critique of the entire effort to ban critical race theory from schools holds true for all the white Republicans making a big stink about it as well. They are all trying to ban something that is not seriously being taught in the schools, because using a term that sounds a little jargon-y and advanced is a lot more palatable to the (white) general public than saying “we just want to ban schools from talking about the existence of racism or teaching about the contributions of anyone but white people.” Which is actually what’s going on here, to the extent that there’s a real effort to influence school curriculum.

YouTube Video