🎥 Is Critical Race Theory (CRT) being taught in schools — or is it just media hype?
In Adversity: Stories of Critical Race Theory, director Daniel Holl interviews parents, educators, and legal experts to uncover how CRT-influenced principles are being quietly embedded in public education — from 1st grade to high school.
🧠Learn how CRT evolved from Marxist theory to critical legal theory, and why it’s now part of debates over hiring, curriculum, and school culture.
📌 Whether you're a concerned parent or curious citizen, this powerful documentary might change how you view what’s being taught in the classroom.
00:00And an end to the original film called Adversity, Stories of Critical Race Theory, looks into the debate surrounding DEI and education in schools and universities.
00:11Joining us now is director Daniel Hull to tell us more about the film.
00:15Daniel, great to see you. It's been too long.
00:17What did you find out by making this great documentary?
00:22Hey, Paul, it's great to see you too.
00:23Well, I found out just like one story ago you were talking about in Minneapolis, how certain people are being hired on certain conditions.
00:34And that's kind of what this documentary is about.
00:37Not about that specific topic, more about focused on what children are learning in their schools.
00:43So to give you an example, there's people talking about what did my daughter coming home from school and hearing,
00:51Oh, all people of color are discriminated against. All women are discriminated against.
00:57Of course, this is one example. I'm not saying this is happening in every school,
01:00but one of the speakers talks directly about this experience, about what her daughter told her one day after school.
01:05The question, what did you learn in school today? And that's what she said.
01:09And that is what we're trying to talk about in this documentary.
01:12What is critical race theory? Where does it come from? What does it do? How is it applied?
01:17And in a more important sense, how are people opposing it?
01:22What age are kids being taught this from in your research?
01:26Well, I'm not going to act like I'm the expert. The real experts are in the film.
01:31And so that's another reason to watch it and not me. It's because you want to hear from the experts.
01:35But they've said all the way from first grade through high school in terms of applying the principles of it.
01:41Now, one of the big debates I've heard before is that people will on in support of critical race theory would say it's not taught in school.
01:48I have a whole section dedicated to that in this documentary that CRT is not taught in school.
01:54And yes, technically, that phrase is correct, because as an academic study, as a class, it is taught in universities.
02:02It is something tied to legal studies. That's what grew out of.
02:06And I go into the entire origin of where it came from in the documentary.
02:10But before it became critical race theory, it did have a legal background.
02:15And legal stuff is generally tied to law schools and universities.
02:19But the important thing is that principles, concepts informed by critical race theory, are being applied in a society-wide sense,
02:27whether it's to a first grader, to a high school student, or even to companies or roles of employment like that story just now about only hiring a certain group of people.
02:40These are the sort of things that I want to talk about and, you can say, even expose in this documentary.
02:46So you mentioned the legal profession, etc.
02:50Where did critical race theory originate from?
02:55Yes. So if you really want to track critical race theory back to its roots, I'll go as far back as I can go.
03:04It originated from theories from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
03:08So you could say it has a Marxist origin.
03:11It developed into a place, or it was developed by scholars at a place called the Frankfurt School in Germany.
03:18Those ideas informed or created something called critical theory that later developed into something called critical legal theory,
03:27which was developed in the United States, the legal sense that I was talking about.
03:31And that, from that, developed critical race theory.
03:34So, but to really cut to the chase, the origins are indeed from the theories of Karl Marx.
03:40Incredible. Daniel, I know you, you have a wide interest in a bunch of different topics, very well informed across the spectrum.
03:48What inspired you to make this particular film?
03:52So that's sort of a two-pronged answer.
03:57The first, the first reason was, well, it was convenience.
04:01I was, the things I was doing at that time, the team I was working with,
04:05led me to meet some of the people who you see in this documentary.
04:09And in our conversations, they ultimately led to discussions of their kids and critical race theory and its prevalence in education.
04:18And then I thought, wow, I'm meeting a lot of people who are discussing this sort of thing.
04:23That seems like a pretty good basis for starting a documentary on.
04:27So that was one reason.
04:28And the other reason is much more personal.
04:31So, for example, my son, my second child was born just one month ago.
04:36So I have a one-month-old, and I have, but, and that makes me think about school.
04:42I also have a four-year-old, and she is, she's already in, she's about to go into kindergarten.
04:47And any parent out there knows that when you've got a kid, you start thinking about where are they going to go to school?
04:53Am I in a good school district?
04:54And if you inform things by your own history, like if you're my age, you're thinking, oh, yeah, school was, it is, it was what it was.
05:02There wasn't really anything political about it.
05:04Using that reference point doesn't really work anymore.
05:08A lot of public schools, from what I've found, do include things like this.
05:14They are just very subtly including, like, this sort of education.
05:19And when, before I made the documentary, I thought to myself, you know, I could go about this for my own family
05:26and, you know, find a solution that works for my daughter, for my son now, and I could just do that.
05:32Or, you know, based on all these people I've met, I can do something broader for the rest of the country.
05:38Interesting.
05:38For other people to know, oh, my goodness, this is what I could do instead.
05:43Very noble of you.
05:44Daniel Hull, we appreciate it.
05:46And you can watch Adversity, Stories of Critical Race Theory on Epoch TV and Vimeo.
05:51Daniel Hull, thank you so much for your time.
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