1 The Real “Boogeyman”: How White Legal Logic Is Used to Create Educational Gag Order Laws in US Higher Education

The goal of the current ‘debate’ about Critical Race Theory is to stifle institutional academic freedom in two ways: through faculty self-censorship and via state legislative censorship such as bans against scholarship and teaching about race-related socio-historical and contextual realities. In many ways, the gag order state laws that normalize epistemic injustice against BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and other racially minoritized People of Color) fit the pattern of what the author calls