GOP vs. CRT: The Legislators Who Write "Anti-CRT" Laws and What They Say on X

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Communication 2

Abstract

Since the beginning of 2021, legislators across the United States have introduced over three hundred of what PEN America calls “gag orders” – what we call “anti-CRT” bills. As of April 2023, twenty-one have been passed and signed into law. In this study, we take a two-stage, sequential mixed-methods design (QUAN --> QUAL) to (1) identify who these legislators are whose bills have been passed and signed into law; (2) to identify, using social network analysis, the connections among said legislators – and outside political actors – on X, formerly known as Twitter; and, finally, (3) to examine, using qualitative storytelling analysis (1989), the substance of the legislators’ tweets on X for the “stock stories” they are using to inaccurately portray critical race theory.

We find, first, that that legislators whose bills have been passed and signed into law are typically white, Republican men. But rather than merely confirming what might seem obvious to most observers – that is, that those who rail against critical race theory are white, Republic men – we also pair these findings with the legislative districts they represent, finding that said districts are overwhelmingly majority white but not exclusive to the boundaries of the South, a stronghold of Republicans since the mid-twentieth century (e.g., Shickler 2016; Mason 2018).

Second, considering that conversations about critical race theory on X can be considered one of “the many specific practices through which Twitter is located in society...” thus informing a co-constitutive relationship between “Twitter and society” (Weller et al., 2014, p. xxxi), we find not only that the most active “anti-CRT” legislators on Twitter were vocal supporters of Donald Trump, a Republican, but also that it was an unelected official – Christopher Rufo – who was both the most-mentioned and most-retweeted account on X. In line with Rufo’s publicly-stated agenda, legislators used an amalgam of hashtags to confuse the meaning of critical race theory.

Finally, after narrowing down our list of legislators to those who posted at least three original critical race theory-related tweets during our specified timeframe – seven legislators, and 179 tweets, in total – we analyzed the substance of the legislators’ tweets through the lens of critical race theory storytelling (Delgado 1989). We find that legislators told clearly identifiable, though false, stories about critical race theory, all of which were variations on what we find to be one overarching stock story that goes like this: “Much like Marxism and Communism, and competing world powers such as the USSR, CRT is a veiled threat whose effect is to subvert American prosperity.” Together, the stories coalesced around a mutual agenda: to malign critical race theory and to justify legislators’ positions as the dominant group in US society.

This is one of the first studies to conduct a systematic examination into “anti-CRT” legislators and their rhetoric on social media, particularly X. We have not only spotlighted the stories as told by these legislators in their more contemporary forms as they relate to critical race theory, but, in the process, have also laid bare their reactionary nature. Methodologically, we use a participatory social justice, mixed-methods design because our goal was to challenge the status quo and expose racism. This design has been characterized as a response to limited theoretical perspectives – in part due to a lack of participatory input and also in part due to a lack of attention to inequity (Creswell & Plano-Clark 2017). Theoretically, our findings not only apply to X, and social media more generally, but speak also to political communication research in general as having been race-neutral and having failed to adequately “theorize racial identities as endogenous to and dynamically connected with politics” (Coles & Lane 2023, 370; see also Freelon et al. 2023). In this study, we not only see racial identity as endogenous to the political phenomena we examine, but also as representative of current power imbalances (Kreiss & McGregor, 2023).

Authors

• Joshua Jordan, Louisiana State University (LSU)

• H Dat Tran, Louisiana State University (LSU)