The Legal Logic of Whiteness: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Policymakers’ Rhetoric in CRT Legislation

Veronica A. Jones and Kaleb L. Briscoe

The Journal of Higher Education, 2025, vol. 96, issue 7, 1271-1299

Abstract: Recent sociopolitical movements have reflected concerted efforts by policymakers to contest socially conscious curriculum, resulting in critical race theory (CRT) legislative bans across the country. CRT as an analytical lens allows scholars to show how policy can uphold the status quo while reinforcing whiteness in society. Anti-CRT legislation has centered on the idea of CRT as divisive, which led to our intentional focus of this study on the initial creation of these policies to analyze the arguments as linked to sociopolitical rhetoric. To this aim, we critically examined the rationales across 42 states and a total of 66 documents using a CRT framework, particularly whiteness as property. We employed the sociocognitive approach to critical discourse analysis (CDA) to reveal how power and racism are reproduced in legal logic, pointing to the relationship between discourse, cognition, and society. Our findings indicate the ways that policymakers invoked race neutrality through emotionality and sought curricular control through dominant norms such as impartiality, objectivity, and historical accuracy. We provide a significant contribution to the body of scholarship on legislative attacks in higher education by focusing on racism and white emotionality, which is reinforced in policy discourse and connected to current political resistance to change.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/00221546.2025.2550902

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