Briahna Joy Gray: Left is ‘missing’ ways critical race theory is being ‘politicized’ by the right

Briahna Joy Gray said Wednesday that progressives should worry less about how critical race theory is defined and more about how “it’s being politicized” by conservatives. 

In an interview on Hill.TV’s “Rising,” the former national press secretary for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) presidential campaign responded to criticism of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s involvement in The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which became a point of controversy surrounding the University of North Carolina’s decision to initially deny the journalist tenure. 

Hannah-Jones wound up taking a position at Howard University instead.

Gray said the project has been labeled by conservative as “having something to do with critical race theory, when it really doesn’t.”

“Critical race theory has become an umbrella term used to encompass a lot of different things that are not critical race theory, including basically any kind of tutelage that involves race or teaching a racial history that is more comprehensive than the history that many of us received in school,” she said. 

She added that “the right is having a much more substantive and ideologically directed project with respect to CRT, they have very specific kind of political goals in mind, and if the left continues to limit itself to a conversation about what CRT is and what CRT isn’t, we’re missing the ways that it’s being politicized and used to advance a kind of politics that I think is really detrimental to working people in America.” 

Watch part of Gray’s interview above.