User:Davidwhittle/sandbox

The definition of Critical Race Theory and its implications for society became a subject of controversy in March of 2012, following the circulation of a 1990 video, posted by Breitbart.com with segments broadcast by Sean Hannity on Fox News, featuring a young Barack Obama, then a student at Harvard Law School and President of the Harvard Law Review, introducing Harvard Law Professor Derrick Bell, one of the originators of Critical Race Theory, at a protest in support of Bell's demand that Harvard Law School appoint its first black female tenured professor.

Many, including CNN's Soledad O'Brien, saw the video as demonstrating a typically cordial relationship between a professor and a student. Some, labeling the controversy "hug-gate," asserted that the critics were overhyping issues that had already been well vetted and dismissed as unimportant. Others wrote that the right was engaged in a propagandistic attempt to establish guilt by association to Bell and CRT via a decades old relationship in order to smear Obama, and others said it represented an attack on America's black intellectuals.

Critics of CRT mistakenly asserted that the video had been previously hidden. They saw in the video evidence that the young Obama embraced not only Bell but also CRT because he had introduced Bell with an appeal to "open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell." CRT critics also asserted that President Obama's alleged "radical past" indicated a sympathy for CRT that was being manifest in his administration, particularly in the Justice Department and its reduction and dismissal of voter intimidation charges against the New Black Panthers, in education, and in the appointment of Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan.