Heritage Foundation on History of Critical Race Theory

Critical race theory (CRT) is a descendent of critical theory (CT), a school of philosophy that began in Frankfurt, Germany, in the 1920s and 1930s at the University of Frankfurt’s Institute for Social Research. It became known as “the Frankfurt School” and was one of the first, if not the first, Western Marxist schools patterned after the Marx–Engels Institute in Moscow.The Frankfurt School’s scholars fled to Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York in 1934 to escape persecution by the Nazis, and were careful to erase the word Marxism from their research papers so as not to attract attention in America. Critical theory was, from the start, an unremitting attack on Western institutions and norms in order to tear them down.
When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based. Applying the philosophy would violate a multitude of American civil rights laws by treating people differently according to race. This presentation will dive into the history and origins of critical theory, critical legal theory and critical race theory, how Americans can identify it, and how we can fight back against this destructive ideology.

Recorded on October 5th, 2021