In Backlash to Racial Reckoning, Conservative Publishers See Gold

This year, right-wing outlets like Fox News have aggressively taken aim at critical race theory, a scholarly framework that examines the role of law and other institutions in perpetuating racial inequality, rather than focusing on individual prejudice. Critics say it is a divisive system of beliefs that portrays whiteness as inherently bad and unfairly paints the country as irredeemably racist, but academics who embrace critical race theory say it has been intentionally misrepresented and widely misused.

The issue has ignited into a cultural firestorm, at a time when the Republican Party plans to focus on culture-war issues in its efforts to retake the House and Senate in the 2022 midterm elections. At least 21 states have introduced or passed legislation that restricts how schools can address race or racism, sometimes calling out critical race theory specifically, according to the Education Commission of the States, which tracks education policy.

In this atmosphere, many books that explore race and racism have been incorrectly labeled critical race theory. At a school board meeting on Long Island last month, some parents objected to “Brown Girl Dreaming,” by Jacqueline Woodson. A memoir written in free verse for young readers, “Brown Girl Dreaming” is about growing up as an African American and becoming a writer. What it is not, Ms. Woodson said in an interview, is critical race theory.

The issue, she said, “is not critical race theory. It’s race.”

In June 2020, just after Mr. Floyd was murdered, sales of books about race and racism exploded. Titles in the discrimination category, which primarily includes books about race, sold 850,000 copies that month, according to NPD BookScan, which tracks the sales of most printed books. The previous June, that figure was 34,000.

The category has been strong ever since. In the first five months of 2021, books on discrimination sold three times as much as they did during the same period the year before, BookScan found, reaching about 90,000 copies in June. Sales of books about civil rights more than quadrupled in those same five months compared with a year earlier.

Even titles published years ago have done unusually well. A book from 1996 called “Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement,” edited by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, saw its sales more than triple from 2019 to 2020, according to its publisher, The New Press. Sales so far this year have already doubled last year’s total.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/15/books/race-antiracism-publishing.html