Richard Delgado. Photo: Courtesy of Richard Delgado
Richard Delgado, one of the founders of the critical race theory movement, tells Axios he and his wife have been receiving a steady stream of threatening messages since the coordinated, conservative campaign against critical race theory began.
Why it matters: Educators across the country — even some elementary school teachers — have faced harassment and threats over the past year over lesson plans that teach about systemic racism in the U.S.
- “We get some of the grossest telephone messages that you can imagine…Some of the stuff is hard to believe. It’s full of venom,” Delgado said. The University of Alabama law professor is the co-author — with his wife, Jean Stefancic — of several books on critical race theory.
- The 82-year-old scholar says the messages accuse him of eating children, wanting to destroy the U.S., and hating white people. (Delgado is Mexican American; Stefancic is white).
- Those emails and voicemails have been steady for a year now, Delgado said.
In his five decades of work shaping critical race theory, Delgado said he’s never experienced such a volume of angry emails and threatening messages.
- “Before then, critical race theory had had a pretty easy glide path. We wrote our books. We developed our theories. We taught our classes. We published law reviews.”
- He blamed the new anger over critical race theory on those who are upset over former President Donald Trump’s loss in 2020 and the nation’s changing racial demographics.
The pandemic also played a role, Delgado said, since parents were forced to talk to their children and found out during the Black Lives Matter protests their children held more progressive views on race.
- “Parent lost it. They blamed the teachers for indoctrinating their kids, even though the kids are growing up in a more diverse world.”
