Reconstructing Democracy in Polarized Times: Thinking through/with the CRT Conflicts

In this essay, we consider how reconstructing our ideas about the nature of democracy, and its relationship to education, can help us respond to contemporary challenges. We focus specifically on the ongoing fights about critical race theory (CRT), providing an overview of the CRT controversy—we argue that its cultivation for political reasons has often lessened the possibility of democratic discussions of race, racism, and ongoing white supremacy. Next, we consider how debates around CRT can help us to rethink how we “do” democracy and how to use education to help cultivate democratic habits and values. Finally, we describe three possibilities for responding to the CRT debates in ways that focus on pragmatic inquiry and that enable better thinking about the democratic purposes of schools to work to change racial habits/values and renew civic education and to increase the health of our democracy.