"Critical race theory is a practice. It's an approach to grappling with a history of White supremacy that rejects the belief that what's in the past is in the past, and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it," said Kimberlé Crenshaw, a founding critical race theorist and a law professor who teaches at UCLA and Columbia University.
Critical race theorists believe that racism is an everyday experience for most people of color, and that a large part of society has no interest in doing away with it because it benefits White elites. Many also believe that American institutions are racist and that people are privileged or oppressed because of their race. While the theory was started as a way to examine how laws and systems promote inequality, it has since expanded. "Critical race theory attends not only to law's transformative role which is often celebrated, but also to its role in establishing the very rights and privileges that legal reform was set to dismantle," Crenshaw told CNN.
Crenshaw was among a group of intellectuals, along with Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman and Richard Delgado, who attended a 1989 conference in Wisconsin that focused on new strategies to combat racism. In 1993, Delgado, Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda and Charles R. Lawrence wrote the book, "Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment."
The theory has a passionate group of followers who are mostly academics. It has inspired at least a dozen books, more than 250 law review articles and several conferences.
2014 Video: Project for doctoral class at Fordham University. Spring 2014 Produced by Evelyn Collins.
Critical race theory (CRT) is an academic movement of civil rights scholars and activists in the United States who seek to critically examine the law as it intersects with issues of race and to challenge mainstream liberal approaches to racial justice. Critical race theory examines social, cultural and legal issues as they relate to race and racism.
Critical race theory originated in the mid-1970s in the writings of several American legal scholars, including Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Cheryl Harris, Charles R. Lawrence III, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia J. Williams. It emerged as a movement by the 1980s, reworking theories of critical legal studies (CLS) with more focus on race. Both critical race theory and critical legal studies are rooted in critical theory, which argues that social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors.
Roy L. Brooks defined critical race theory in 1994 as "a collection of critical stances against the existing legal order from a race-based point of view". Richard Delgado, a co-founder of the theory, defined it in 2017 as "a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power"
In the early 1980s, students of color at Harvard Law School organized protests regarding Harvard's lack of racial diversity in the curriculum, among students, and in the faculty. These students supported Professor Derrick Bell, who left Harvard Law in 1980 and then became the dean at University of Oregon School of Law. During his time at Harvard, Bell had developed new courses that studied American law through a racial lens. Harvard students of color wanted faculty of color to teach the new courses in his absence. Bell resigned his position at Harvard because of what he viewed as the university's discriminatory practices.
Critical race theory is loosely unified by two common themes: first, that white supremacy, with its societal or structural racism, exists and maintains power through the law; and second, that transforming the relationship between law and racial power, and also achieving racial emancipation and anti-subordination more broadly, is possible
Common themes in CRITICAL RACE THEORY
, as documented by such scholars as Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, include:
Critique of liberalism: Critical race theory scholars question foundational liberal concepts such as Enlightenment rationalism, legal equality, and Constitutional neutrality, and challenge the incrementalist, step-by-step approach of traditional civil-rights discourse; they favor a race-conscious approach to social transformation, critiquing liberal ideas such as affirmative action, color blindness, role modeling, or the merit principle; and an approach that relies more on political organizing, in contrast to liberalism's reliance on rights-based remedies.
Storytelling, counter-storytelling, and "naming one's own reality": The use of narrative (storytelling) to illuminate and explore experiences of racial oppression. Bryan Brayboy has emphasized the epistemic importance of storytelling in Indigenous-American communities as superseding that of theory, and has proposed a Tribal Critical Race Theory (TribCrit).
Revisionist interpretations of American civil rights law and progress: Criticism of civil-rights scholarship and anti-discrimination law, such as Brown v. Board of Education. Derrick Bell, one of CRT's founders, argues that civil-rights advances for black people coincided with the self-interest of white elitists. Likewise, Mary L. Dudziak performed extensive archival research in the U.S. Department of State and Department of Justice, including the correspondence by U.S. ambassadors abroad, and concluded that U.S. civil-rights legislation was not passed because people of color were discriminated against; rather, it was enacted in order to improve the image of the United States in the eyes of third-world countries that the US needed as allies during the Cold War.
Intersectional theory: The examination of race, sex, class, national origin, and sexual orientation, and how their combination (i.e., their intersections) plays out in various settings, e.g., how the needs of a Latina female are different from those of a black male and whose needs are the ones promoted.
Standpoint epistemology: The view that a member of a minority has an authority and ability to speak about racism that members of other racial groups do not have, and that this can expose the racial neutrality of law as false.
Essentialism vs. anti-essentialism: Delgado and Stefancic write, "Scholars who write about these issues are concerned with the appropriate unit for analysis: Is the black community one, or many, communities? Do middle- and working-class African-Americans have different interests and needs? Do all oppressed peoples have something in common?" This is a look at the ways that oppressed groups may share in their oppression but also have different needs and values that need to be looked at differently. It is a question of how groups can be essentialized or are unable to be essentialized.
Structural determinism: Exploration of how "the structure of legal thought or culture influences its content", whereby a particular mode of thought or widely shared practice determines significant social outcomes, usually occurring without conscious knowledge. As such, theorists posit that our system cannot redress certain kinds of wrongs.
Empathetic fallacy: Believing that one can change a narrative by offering an alternative narrative in hopes that the listener's empathy will quickly and reliably take over. Empathy is not enough to change racism as most people are not exposed to many people different from themselves and people mostly seek out information about their own culture and group.
Non-white cultural nationalism/separatism: The exploration of more radical views that argue for separation and reparations as a form of foreign aid (including black nationalism)
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This topic has been doing the rounds a lot at the moment, at least online, with some commentators, particularly those on the 'right' talking about 'cultural Marxism'. Those on the 'left' have also been critical of crt, accusing it of being a form of neoliberal identity politics, amongst other things.
"Standpoint epistemology: The view that a member of a minority has an authority and ability to speak about racism that members of other racial groups do not have, and that this can expose the racial neutrality of law as false."
The above kind of makes some sense in theory, but in reality it doesnt stop the middle class (largely white) academics who promote it from doing the opposite, which is to tell everyone else, sometimes including those of us impacted by it, about racism, or using actual Black and minority people, or who they believe to be (Rachael Dolezal, Jess La Bombalera) about it, thinking it adds some kind of authenticity.
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