By importing Trump’s culture war, the Conservatives are trying to close down any discussion of structural inequality
Until this month, according to the parliamentary record, Hansard, the term “critical race theory” had never once been uttered in the House of Commons chamber. By the end of the day on 20 October, however, it was of such importance that the government declared itself “unequivocally against” the concept. “We do not want to see teachers teaching their pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt,” warned the equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, at the end of a six-hour debate to mark Black History Month. “Any school which teaches these elements of critical race theory, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law.”
Strictly speaking, critical race theory is an academic field that originated in the US around 40 years ago. As the British academic Kojo Koram notes, it began as an attempt by legal scholars to understand why black communities experienced discrimination in the criminal justice system, even though they were formally guaranteed equal rights. Today, the term has become a kind of shorthand in US politics for an approach to race relations that asks white people to consider their structural advantage within a system that has, historically, been profoundly racist.
