Critical race theory
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- For criticism see Criticism of Critical_race_theory
Critical Race Theory (CRT) began as a response to critical legal studies. CRT is concerned with racism, racial subordination and discrimination. It emphasizes the socially constructed and discursive nature of race, considers judicial conclusions to be the result of the workings of the intersection of race with other social phenomena but sees race as a primary factor, and opposes the continuation of all forms of subordination. Analyzing racial inequity as the social construction of race and discrimination are present in the scholarship of such established critical race theorists as Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Neil Gotanda, Cheryl I. Harris, Charles Lawrence, III Mari Matsuda, and Patricia J. Williams in the legal field. In the field of education, notable scholars include Gloria Ladson-Billings, Laurence Parker, Daniel Solórzano and William Tate and a second wave of CRT in education scholars, Thandeka Chapman, Adrienne Dixson, Jamel Donnor, Garrett A. Duncan, Marvin Lynn, Celia Rousseau, David Stovall and Tara Yosso.
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Key theoretical elements
Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (1993) note the following major themes in critical race theory writings:
- A critique of liberalism
- Storytelling/counterstorytelling and "naming one's own reality"
- Revisionist interpretations of American civil rights law and progress
- Applying insights from social science writing on race and racism to legal problems
- Structural determinism, how "the structure of legal thought or culture influences its content"
- The intersections of race, sex, and class
- Essentialism and anti-essentialism
- Cultural nationalism/separatism, Black nationalism
- Legal institutions, Critical pedagogy, and minorities in the bar
- Criticism and self-criticism
Critical race theory emerged in part from the milieu of Critical Legal Studies (CLS), a field of inquiry that argues that preserving the interests of power, rather than the demands of principle and precedent, is the guiding force behind legal judgments. CLS theorists suggest that the existing precedents are indeterminate, allowing the judiciary wide freedom to interpret them according to prevailing balance of power. Both CLS and Critical Race Theory scholars engage in deconstructing extended arguments to demonstrate that legal precedents are not based on a consistent application of legal principles. Critical Race Theory shares an overlapping literature with both Critical Legal Studies and Critical Theory, feminist jurisprudence, and postcolonial theory.
Major contributors
In The Constitutional Contradiction, Bell argues that the framers of the U.S. Constitution chose the rewards of property over equality and justice. Interest-convergence, Bell argues, is the notion that whites will promote opportunities for blacks only when they converge with the interests of Whites. For Bell, interest-convergence represents a significant obstacle to racial parity and equity for African Americans. Racial realism, according to Bell, is both the acceptance of the permanence of racism and a challenge to racial equality. Bell believes that the pursuit of racial equality is futile in a societal structure in which African Americans are permanently on the bottom. Bell argues that Racial Realist should adopt a strategy that acknowledges the permanence of racism but agitates for equity. Bell's insights cast traditional racial discourse in a different, more critical light.
Other significant contributors to the critical race theory discourse from the 1980s to the present include Richard Delgado and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. Delgado defends Bell’s storytelling or narrative style, and argues that people of color speak from an experience framed by racism. Delgado argues that the stories of people of color have a different frame of reference that challenges dominant culture and the hegemony of whiteness. These voices, Delgado argues, need to be heard to speak back to the master narrative. Critical race theorists believe that perspective of oppressed racial minorities must be understood in the context of their own narrative. In other words, CRT scholars believe it is important that oppressed people bear witness to their experiences with discrimination, racism, sexism and oppression and that those stories must be valued by the Court, policy makers and the public at-large.
Crenshaw argues that little difference exists between conservative and liberal discourse on race-related law and policy. Crenshaw identifies two distinct properties in anti-discrimination law: expansive and restrictive properties. The former stresses equality as an outcome relying on the courts to eliminate effects of racism. The latter treats equality as a process. Its focus is to prevent any future wrongdoing. Crenshaw argues that expansive and restrictive properties can co-exist in anti-discrimination law. That is, we can look to provide equality in process as long as we can ensure equity in outcome. Failure to ensure equitable outcomes and focus only on process, argues Crenshaw, merely serves to maintain the status quo.
Critical race theory has been explored in education in two waves of scholarship. The first wave of CRT studies in education emanated in the mid-1990s with the introduction of CRT to the field by Ladson-Billings and Tate. Parker and Solorzano's contributions followed soon thereafter. The second wave of scholarship began in the late 1990s and continues today. Chapman, Dixson, Donnor, Duncan, Lynn, Rousseau, Stovall and Yosso, represent the second generation of scholars who have used CRT to examine racial inequity in education by expanding methodological, epistemological and pedagogical boundaries.
Applications
Critical Race Theory has been applied in a variety of contexts where institutionalized oppression of racial minorities has been litigated in courts (critical race theorists often present amicus curiae briefs, or critically examine the rulings of these cases). [1]
One particular application has been to hate crime and hate speech legislation. In response to Justice Scalia's opinion in a paradigm hate speech case, R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (which addressed cross burning as an act of hate speech), Mari Matsuda and Charles R. Lawrence III presented a critical race theory argument against Scalia's opinion. While Scalia posits that speech is protected independent of content, Matsuda and Lawrence argue that historical and social context is paramount. When acts of speech are acts of intimidation and threaten violence, backed up by a historical force, then those words become a mechanism for social control and domination. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously with Justice Scalia 9-0, that the cross burning in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul was protected by the First Amendment.
Delgado also draws on CRT in calling for a tort action for racial insults, looking to the historical pattern of speech and the serious psychological harm inflicted on its victims as just measures for evaluating hate speech.
Angela P. Harris, Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia J. Williams have done influential work examining critical race theory and feminist legal theory.[2], [3], [4]
Offshoot fields
Scholars in other academic disciplines have also examined the concept of whiteness. In the field of Critical White Studies, a number of scholars, including Toni Morrison, Eric Foner, Andrew Hacker, John Howard Griffin, David Roediger, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Noel Ignatiev, Cherríe Moraga, Maurice Berger, bell hooks, Fasching-Varner and Reginald Horsman, ask:
- How was whiteness invented, and why?
- How has the category of whiteness changed over time?
- Why did some immigrant groups, such as the Irish and Jews, start out as nonwhite and later become white?
- Can some individual people be both white and nonwhite at different times, and what does it mean to "pass for white"?
- At what point does pride in being white cross the line into white power or white supremacy?
- What can whites concerned over racial inequity or white privilege do about it? [5]
Within Critical Race Theory, ethnic subdivisions have emerged, including:
- Latino Critical Race Studies or LatCrit. Many LatCrit writings were anthologized in Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic's The Latino/a Condition: A Critical Reader (1998).
- Asian American Critical Race Studies or AsianCrit.
- American Indian Critical Race Studies or TribalCrit.
References
Notes
- ^ Dixson and Rousseau, 2006
- ^ Martha Fineman, introduction to Angela Harris, "Beyond Equality: Power and the Possibility of Freedom in the Republic of Choice", 85 Cornell Law Review 1181 (2000).
- ^ Kimberlé Crenshaw, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics." University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989:139-167 (1989)
- ^ Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: A Diary of a Law Professor, Harvard University Press (1992).
- ^ http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1338_reg.html Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror, edited by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic
Bibliography
- Brewer, Mary. Staging Whiteness. Wesleyan University Press, 2005.
- Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas. eds. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. New York: New Press, 1995.
- Delgado, Richard. ed. Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.
- Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic. "Critical Race Theory: An Annotated Bibliography." Virginia Law Review, Vol. 79, No. 2. (Mar., 1993), pp. 461-516.
- Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic. The Latino/a Condition: A Critical Reader. New York University Press, 1998.
- Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race theory: An Introduction. New York University Press, 2001.
- Dixson, Adrienne D. and Celia K. Rousseau, eds., Critical Race Theory in Education: All God's Children Got a Song. New York: Routledge, 2006.
- Ladson-Billings, G.J. and Tate, W.F. (1994). Toward a theory of critical race theory in education. Teachers College Record, 97, 47-68.
- Parker, Laurence, Donna Deyhle, and Sofia Villenas. eds. Race Is, Race Ain't: Critical Race Theory and Qualitative Studies in Education. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999.
- Solorzano, D. (1997). "Images and Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Racial Stereotyping, and Teacher Education." Teacher Education Quarterly, 24, 5-19.
- Solorzano, D., Ceja, M. & Yosso, T. (2000). “Critical Race Theory, Racial Microaggressions and Campus Racial Climate: The Experiences of African American College Students.” Journal of Negro Education, 69, 60-73.
- Solorzano, D. & Delgado Bernal, D. (2001). “Examining Transformational Resistance Through a Critical Race and LatCrit Theory Framework: Chicana and Chicano Students in an Urban Context.” Urban Education, 36, 308-342.
- Solorzano, D. & Yosso, T. (2001). "Critical Race and LatCrit Theory and Method: Counterstorytelling Chicana and Chicano Graduate School Experiences." International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 14, 471-495.
- Solorzano, D. & Yosso, T. (2002). "A Critical Race Counterstory of Affirmative Action in Higher Education." Equity and Excellence in Education, 35, 155-168.
- Tate, William F. "Critical Race Theory and Education: History, Theory, and Implications." Review of Research in Education, Vol. 22. (1997), pp. 195-247.
- Velez, V., Perez Huber, L., Benavides, C., de la Luz, A. & Solorzano, D. (2008). “Battling for Human rights and Social Justice: A Latina/o Critical Race Analysis of Latina/o Student Youth Activism in the Wake of 2006 Anti-Immigrant Sentiment.” Social Justice, 35, 7-27.
- Yosso, Tara J. Critical Race Counterstories along the Chicana/Chicano Educational Pipeline. New York: Routledge, 2006.
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