John Oliver's CRT Segment is Disinformation
One of the pernicious effects of misinformation is the way it creates alternate realities. We hear about polarization in our socio-political landscape, but I think there’s a more accurate word:
Fragmentation.
We’re living in a fragmented world.
There are over 1,700 commercial TV stations in the U.S. today, a number that has more than tripled since the 1960s. There are 559 scripted original series to watch.
Our information—and disinformation—comes from a lot of sources. Everyone has a tailored, personalized, algorithmic feed of news.
That’s why it’s important to note that conspiratorial thinking isn’t based on ignorance. People caught up in conspiracies often know way more about grassy knolls and the melting point of steel beams than the average person does. Anti-vaxxers can cite vaccine studies and quote experts who hold impressive credentials, verbatim.
Conspiracies don’t rely on people being ignorant. They rely on people being obsessive. Disinformation often works the same way. A lack of information isn’t the real problem. Targeted, selective information is what pulls people in. Information that leaves out key details, and plays on strong emotional pulls.
Unfortunately, it looks like that’s exactly what John Oliver did with his February episode of Last Week Tonight.
Wait, John Oliver did a Disinformation??
Follow me through 5 points and make up your mind.
I’m a fan of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. It is an longstanding favorite among left-leaning audiences. As much as I usually enjoy the show, the episode on CRT, or Critical Race Theory, is simply disinformation. I think it’s important to address that.
1. Using selective video clips
In the first two minutes of the episode, we’re shown a series of videos where parents, politicians, and commentators attack CRT. One thing that’s painfully obvious? They’re all white. As a matter of fact, every single person shown criticizing CRT, in the entire episode, is white.
In preparing this segment, Oliver could have easily included clips from these parents:
Brian Echevarria
Fallon Clark
Agree or disagree with their points, the issue is that Oliver didn’t include a single one of their voices. Instead, he made sure to only include clips from white, conservative parents. He did that on purpose. His audience already has strong negative associations with such people.
If he were interested in educating his audience, Oliver might have noted that a 2021 Economist/YouGov poll showed Critical Race Theory has just a 68% approval rate among black respondents. He might have gone looking for any of the 32% who don’t fall in that camp. But undoubtedly, showing clips of black parents opposing CRT would undermine his point.
Here’s the thing, which I can say confidently as a professional communicator: When trying to persuade honestly, it’s more effective to highlight—rather than hide—what’s inconvenient to your point. That’s why I’ll tell you now: if you research the list above, you’ll find that Echevarria is running for political office, and King has been a paid Republican strategist. I could have left those details unsaid, hoping you wouldn’t find out. But that isn’t my style. It’s John Oliver’s style.
Anyway, here’s what he does next.
2. Using misleading definitions
What is CRT, really? Oliver describes it as a “body of legal scholarship that began in the 1970s that attempted to understand why racism and inequality persisted after the Civil Rights movement.”
He goes out of his way to stress that CRT is just a graduate-level law-school concept.
However, anybody can quickly find out that’s not true. Look at what Oxford Research Encyclopedia has to say (all emphases mine):
“In the field of education, CRT is a helpful tool for analyzing policy issues such as school funding, segregation, language policies, discipline policies, and testing and accountability policies. It is also helpful for critically examining the larger issues of epistemology and knowledge production, which are reflected in curriculum and pedagogy. As education is one of the major institutions of knowledge production and dissemination, CRT scholars often push the field to critically examine the master or dominant narratives reproduced in schools and the counter-narratives that are silenced. CRT is a theoretical framework that provides education researchers, policy makers, and practitioners with critical lenses to deconstruct oppressive policies and practices and to construct more emancipatory systems for racial equity and justice.”
Perhaps John Oliver and his crack team of researchers missed that, but it’s harder to explain missing the most famous encyclopedia in the world.
From the Encyclopedia Brittanica:
“CRT has influenced scholarship in fields outside the confines of legal studies, including women’s and gender studies, education, American studies, and sociology. In the early 21st century, critical race theorists addressed themselves to a number of issues, including police brutality and criminal justice, hate speech and hate crimes, health care, affirmative action, poverty and the welfare state, immigration, and voting rights.”
One more interesting tidbit:
“CRT provides a relevant, research-based framework through which education leaders and policymakers can think about the social construct of race and the impact of racism on students of color. This framework also provides educators the tools they need to transform current practices in teaching and learning and to examine the attitudes - implicit or implicit - that they bring into their classrooms. CRT also allows for the creation of new policies, practices and curricula that help students think critically about their lives, and to develop their own affirmative racial identities - which is important for all students.”
That’s from Education Post, a nonprofit funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. These examples ought to show that CRT is much more than a concept taught in law school.
If you’d like to understand the 6 to 8 core tenets of the CRT framework, an encyclopedia is a good place to start. Anyone who’s done that won’t be fooled by Oliver’s attempt to convince you CRT is only the idea “racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.”
It’s a whole lot more. He knows that. He thinks his audience won’t find out.
3. Obscuring key details
As he describes conservative claims that CRT says ‘some races are superior to others,’ or that it ‘teaches kids to hate America,’ Oliver is dismissive:
“None of that is remotely true!” he gestures emphatically.
Surprise, surprise… he isn’t being forthright. Consider what Derek Bell, a founding CRT scholar, wrote: “CRT scholars argued that solutions that stay within the bounds of liberalism are insufficient.”
Critical theories look for deep, system-wide issues that underlie the problems we see on the surface. Critiquing liberal society at its core is, at some level, a bit radical:
“CRT inherits… a commitment to being “critical,” which in this sense means also to be “radical”—to locate problems not at the surface of doctrine but in the deep structure of American law and culture.” - Angela Harris
Being critical, at a systemic level, of America’s deep legal and cultural structures…. might be seen as similar to hating America. I can understand why some parents might see them as similar concepts. Can you?
Oliver spends much of the segment highlighting the work of conservative activist Chris Rufo, making the case that he has tried to warp and broaden “Rufo’s definition” of CRT.
He fails to mention that the definition was broadened by CRT scholars themselves, as you read in the encyclopedia entries above.
Moreover, Kimberlé Crenshaw, a founding scholar of the movement, described Critical Race Theory in 2002 as “now used as interchangeably for race scholarship as Kleenex is used for tissue.”
Clearly, Crenshaw has known for at least two decades that CRT has grown far beyond the legal sphere. But while Oliver shows a video clip of Crenshaw in his segment, he fails to notice that her writing contradicts his thesis.
Maybe his team just missed it!
4. Pretending to represent critics’ perspectives
In debate and persuasion, it’s common to bring up some of your opponents’ points and argue against them. In that spirit, Oliver highlights some of the “bad cases” of race-based education gone wrong. He frames them as “mistakes” that are quite natural for teachers to make.
However, you can tell he’s using the technique as a rhetorical ploy. He pretends to address counterpoints, hoping his audience won’t bother finding out what opponents are actually fired up about:
Some schools, such as the San Diego Unified School District and Seattle School District, have featured teacher education about “spirit-murdering” black students.
A psychiatrist gave a talk at Yale, fantasizing about “emptying a revolver into the head of any white person” who got in her way, as a method of addressing rage.
An elementary school in San Jose had third-grade students “deconstruct” their oppressive identities and rank themselves.
Wake County schools offered a course on CRT (through a contractor founded by oddly named Democratic state representative Graig Meyer).
An NYC psychoanalyst described “whiteness” as a parasitic condition with no known cure.
You can peruse this list, assembled by a Cornell Law School professor, and decide for yourself how troubling the cases in K-12 schools may or may not be.
Here’s my point: If he wanted to persuade, Oliver could have brought up any of these concerns. Instead, he did exactly what he accuses Rufo of doing: cherry-picking examples that support his point.
Think about what this does in our fragmented socio-political reality: when someone like Chris Rufo or Tucker Carlson only shows examples that back up their case, and John Oliver only shows examples that back up his case, they both ensure their audiences occupy different realities.
Problem is, none of those audiences see the full picture. This is how disinformation works.
5. Misleading his audience
At one point, Oliver says, “Unless your five-year-old is currently pursuing a law degree, they’re not reading Kimberlé Crenshaw.”
But that isn’t the issue. That’s a straw-man version of the argument.
Let’s face it. There is a type of thinking that’s swept from the corners of academia into workplaces and, yes, some classrooms too.
It looks a bit like this:
That’s what parents are often concerned about. And this:
“Professionalism is a Relic of White Supremacist Work Culture”
“Why the Audacity of White Feminism is the Core of White Supremacy”
A lot of parents associate all of that with CRT.
Are they wrong? Well, there are two important things to note: first, this stuff still isn’t very common in grade schools. To that extent, it is a conservative moral panic.
Second, what you’ve just read isn’t, strictly speaking, Critical Race Theory. It’s just critical theory, applied to race.
Duh, right?
I don’t have enough space here to get into the distinction, but you can start by reading about Tema Okun’s work. What parents at school board meetings are railing against is, basically, Okun’s interpretation of critical theory as applied to race, which is common in a certain subset of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) workshops.
It’s related to CRT… but distinct.
John Oliver could have used his episode to clarify the distinctions and similarities.
But he didn’t. He wanted to dismiss the concerns of parents. Remember his argument that kids aren’t reading Crenshaw’s texts?
Now imagine a group of parents who are outraged that they found a school teaching their first graders how to put condoms on bananas. When they complain at the school board meeting that their kids are too young to learn that type of sex education, they’re told “Your kids aren’t being taught about sex education! Don’t be absurd, do you see any textbooks about Mary Calderone in the curriculum?”
See the problem? The concerns aren’t about whether or not students are learning about the theorists behind a discipline. They’re concerned about whether the discipline is being actually implemented in classrooms.
John Oliver is smart enough to know that. He is giving his audience selective details, leaving out key pieces, reinforcing biases, and playing on the listeners’ strong emotional pulls. He is deliberately spreading disinformation.
Next time a person or news article tries to tell you CRT is just about “teaching accurate American history” or “not making white people uncomfortable,” you’ll immediately know they are, to be blunt, full of shit.
Well, John Oliver is an Entertainer
It’s true that his role, first and foremost, is to entertain. Oliver has a viewpoint and is there to persuade as much as he is to inform.
Fair enough.
However, if you want to persuade in an ethical and effective way, it’s important to address the best version of an opponent’s argument.
It’s also important not to omit key details. Once an audience notices, trust goes out the window. In this segment, Oliver tries to dismiss the debate over CRT as “angry white parents” leading a made-up conservative campaign to prevent racial topics from being discussed in schools.
If I were the conspiratorial type, I might think Oliver released this episode to help undermine a key group that Crenshaw has been targeting: middle-class white parents.
But I think it’s more likely Oliver simply thinks his audience is too dumb to pick up an encyclopedia and realize he’s lying. A fun audience, yes, and nice. But dumb.
Anyway, along the way, Oliver does make quite a few points that are true. But he isn’t using truth to steer his audience from ignorance to enlightenment. John Oliver isn’t informing his audience at all.
He’s feeding them disinformation.
Editor’s note: I don’t want to come across as defending Rufo. I don’t think he’s a serious person, I don’t think he’s helping anyone with his activism, I think he’s helped cloud this issue, I don’t think he has much of an ethical core, and I don’t like most of the bills he’s inspired state legislators to run with. I hope I’ve made the case that nobody I’ve mentioned in this story is right. Hopefully this article doesn’t even seem negative about CRT! I think there are good and bad aspects to the framework that are worth discussing. But to handle handle this topic right, we have to admit parents aren’t attacking a mirage—there’s something real they’re seeing. Then, clarify that it’s not the same as CRT. Maybe even ask some CRT experts to disavow some of the “objectivity-and-hard-work-are-whiteness” type ideas from Okun.
Trust encyclopedias!