The following forward was graciously provided by its author at the request of we, the staff here at the Culture War Encyclopedia (Justin Trouble and Tabby), who greatly appreciate it. It seems that brevity is indeed the soul of wit. For, you see, his forward below encapsulates with profundity and succinctness that which is most important to know about CRT in a way that I, Justin Trouble, whose eyes have become too accustomed to looking at it through a microscope was unable to. We are honored.
FORWARD
Critical Race Theory (often given the simplistic acronym “CRT”) is an interesting subject- not so much because of its own internal rigor (for it contains little), but because of public reaction to the same. The subject is relatively easily understood, but is debated fairly hotly nonetheless- a sure sign of social propaganda being utilized. The premise of the “theory” (really more a catch-all Marxist dog-whistle) can be debunked in many ways- Fairly simply, as in my own treatment of the concept, or much more thoroughly, as in the present work, with quotations, notes, and so forth.
CRT is effectively a self refuting overall schema of thought in the social and political sense. It posits a legal system built by and for white people, while seeking to increase the scope and power of the same system, with the supposed goal of uplifting people who are not white. How this can happen in such a professedly corrupted system is scantly addressed. It proposes (in some literature) that the civil rights era in the United States was fundamentally a failure, and that it is reparations (economic vengeance) that will solve long-standing ethnic and racial issues, not the concept of equality under the law.
The profuse terminology subjugate to the premise itself at times approaches a level of convolution reserved more generally for “the bad guys” in a dystopian fiction novel. “Microaggression” is the mere shining tip of a gigantic iceberg languishing in darker waters below. In this work- which I have read with great delight- you will see things far more bizarre and intellectually decrepit than just the now already-outdated microaggression. Indeed, what was labeled hilariously “out there” a half decade ago is now normal parlance, and with each sharpening of the knife of propaganda and pseudoscience, a new edge is born.
Where my own work on this subject was effectively meant as a brief primer based on the premises of CRT proposed by its adherents and supporters, this work here is more of an exhaustive effort, as I previously stated, providing quotations and so forth. It is intriguing that people seriously employed, sometimes in positions of power, have adopted an un-critical view of this supposedly critical theory (or system of sub-theories) and that it is being actively promulgated in educational, political, and legal circles. We may comfort ourselves by thinking that only a fool would believe in a concept such as CRT- as it is, again, self refuting and ignores a competent view of Western history- but this is perhaps unhelpful; in the end either a significant number of our fellow citizens are therefore fools (believing in the same) or are rather, victims of propaganda- indeed, with Critical Race Theory representing a form of off-shoot moral panic more than anything else, and a paranoia towards Caucasians and towards an admittedly warped legal system- one just as warped towards the same Caucasians as it is towards any other included group.
It is doubtless in the end that Critical Race Theory will be relegated to the dustbin of history where it belongs, along with a thousand other relics of the past, and will be remembered as no more true in a century than miasmatic theory is today. However, it should be noted that works such as this present text are required to ensure such eventual capitulation of falsehood to truth- for without any pushing back, any lie or any system based on lies may flourish and grow and continue to exist unperturbed.
Tarl gets it! He understands the raison d'être of the Culture War Encyclopedia. Our culture needs a way by which anyone can instantly conjure up the facts and proof about anything contested in the culture war. Wield the radiant sword of truth in these dark times, with its sharpness discriminate between fact and fiction and by its light dispel the shadows of ignorance and deceit. We are honored that Tarl understands why we work so hard.
Speaking of which, Styx’s videos and quotes from his books as Tarl Warwick will be easily found all throughout the Encyclopedia.
INTRODUCTION
What, exactly, is critical race theory (CRT)? Has it been taught in schools? Should it be? Is it just a term some right wingers apply to American history lessons involving race that they do not want their children to be taught?
These questions tend to be divisive. Responses from the media tend to be politically motivated (at least some put on an appearance as such) and neither well informed nor honest. To nail down precisely what CRT is, we will draw almost entirely from works that critical race theorists themselves put forward as the key writings that formed their movement and from other works by those key writers insofar as they pertain to CRT.1
With CRT as with such things as progressivism, BLM, antifa and feminism, if certain aspects are pointed out, the objection will be made that these aspects are not part of the ideology or group in question. Some people try to argue that CRT does not really exist because there is no one true critical race theory doctrine, no official tax exempt CRT church and no organization registered with the government called Critical Race Theory Incorporated. They fail to see - or feign ignorance on the matter - that things like ideologies, political philosophies and informal associations do not work that way.
There is no one true/official organization representing conservatism. Does this mean conservatism can not be defined, described, criticized and so on? Or can conservatives dismiss any criticism of conservatism with, “that’s not real conservatism”, “that person is not a real conservative” or “conservatism is just an idea”?
The answer is obvious.
Yet, from experience, I can predict with almost absolute certainty that some will argue that the writers I quote from are not critical race theorists and/or that their works upon which we base our research are not representative of CRT. Others claim that there’s really no such thing as critical race theory just as some have argued that there is no such thing as cultural Marxism or that antifa is just an idea.
As we’ll see, CRT has a back-history which we will trace, it has a father figure, it has major players who have come to refer themselves and each other as critical race theorists or crits and so on, and refer to the collection of their stances as critical race theory. In fact, CRT has something approaching an unofficial cannon. I’m talking about the books and essays by these major figures in CRT that we use as our main sources.
Some capitalize the term, some did not. Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay have capitalized the word theory but not the words critical or race when they write “critical race Theory” in their book Cynical Theories.2 According to common practice, we will not capitalize the term except when quoting sources that do as we just did. It is also a fact that these people sometimes referred to themselves and each other as critical race theorists, critical race philosophers, critical race writers and crits and there seems to be no contention among them on this matter.
As we’ll see, major universities refer to these writers as critical race theory scholars - which is how Columbia Law School describes Kimberlé W. Crenshaw,3 a crit from whom we draw our knowledge of CRT - or refer to them as, for example, “one of the nation’s foremost scholars on critical race theory” as Western State College of Law characterizes Neil Gotanda, an other crit we quote.4 In the appendix About the Crits Referenced in This Piece we demonstrate that each and every crit we quote from or reference is in fact a crit according to academia, themselves and each other.
As I write these words, Cornel West is running for president. He wrote the forward to the hefty book (with tiny print and no index) Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, published in 1995, consisting mostly of essays from years prior. The editors of that book, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendall Thomas are themselves critsas can be seen below in APPENDIX: About the Crits Referenced in This Piece.
An other book we will draw from heavily is Critical Race Theory - An Introduction (2017) by Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado who is one of the few critswhoseformative writings are included in Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement.5
We will also be referencing the book How to Be an Antiracist from 2019 by Ibram X. Kendi.6Cornel West is quoted as calling Kendi “an unprecedented phenomenon”.
Until critical race theory became too controversial,7 the Biden admin endorsed8Ibram X. Kendi, his book How to Be an Antiracist and The New York Times’ book The 1619 Project - A New Origin Story, another collection of works under one cover that will serve as a source in our look at critical race theory.9
To be fair, we will look at a bit of criticism of critical race theory in book from10 from Tarl Warwick (AKA Styxhexenhammer666) and others.
Most of what we present here about critical race theory will be from these books by crits and the essays by crits contained therein that were formative to the movement.
The word critical here means that its intention and methods are specifically geared towards identifying and exposing problems in order to facilitate revolutionary political change.
In a few cases, such as Ibram X. Kendi, the writer may not use the term critical race theory to refer their views but their views align with what other such writers do refer to as critical race theory. For the most part, they use the term to describe their views, they refer to themselves and each other as critical race theorists, they title their books with the term critical race theory, they are referred to by universities as being authorities in critical race theory and I provide citations for all of it, for each and every claim made. If it is possible to provide a higher quantity of proof per claim than I do in the Culture War Encyclopedia, it would be surprising.
OVERVIEW of CRT ACCORDING to CRITICAL RACE THEORISTS
Short Version
Overview of CRT According to Cornel West
Overview of CRT According to John Calmore
Overview of CRT According to Other Critical Race Theorists
Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law
main area of investigation is, as Cornel West puts it, “the historical centrality and complicity of law in upholding white supremacy (and concomitant hierarchies of gender, class, and sexual orientation)”
according to Dino Franco Felluga15 in Critical Theory - The Key Concepts.16
Dr. Cornel West; scholar, activist, candidate for president, 2024.
Critical Race Theory is the most exciting development in contemporary legal studies. This comprehensive movement in thought and life - created primarily though not exclusively, by progressive intellectuals of color - compels us to confront critically the most explosive issue in American civilization: the historical centrality and complicity of law in upholding white supremacy (and concomitant hierarchies of gender, class, and sexual orientation).
Critical Race Theory is a gasp of emancipatory hope that law can serve liberation rather than domination.
It may help the reader to be aware that West’s definitions of terms like liberation and domination may be quite different than their own. Also, there is the little matter of CRT’s stance on racial separatism which we will come to below.
West made a name for himself outside of CRT but he is something of an honorary crit as witnessed by the fact that he wrote the forward to Critical Race Theory - the Key Writings That Formed the Movement.
I want to be sure to not give the reader the impression that Calmore’s “systematic description” of CRT is complete or even systematic. That is their claim, not mine. However his essay is included as one of the key writings in Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement and they clearly approve of his description. Hence, we heed it here.
Calmore writes21 that CRT begins with the view that race is a social construct. This will be elaborated upon in the section below in the section dedicated to race as a social construct and in the entry in the Culture Ware Encyclopedia on race.
Critical Race Theory recombines and extends existing means of legal redress; hence it is necessarily eclectic, incorporating what seems helpful from various disciplines, doctrines, styles, and methods.
Indeed, this is so as the reader will see in the course of this piece. CRT is intersectional according to Calmore.28 We will explore intersectionality in CRT later.
He also place importance on ‘voice’ in CRT.29 Crits use the term voice to mean something like a distinctive style of communication. When an artist is said to have found their voice, it means that one can tell the art was created by that artist just from the art itself. In CRT, there is a focus on what they sometimes call voice of color, the voice-of-color thesis, sometimes called the unique voice of color thesis. See the section below on voice of color for more.
Calmore discusses CRT’s opposition to color blindness, that is, the non-neutral stance on skin color.30 In other words, CRT is race conscious, meaning that in CRT people are judged by the color of their skin. We will discuss all of these below.
Calmore also states that CRT is anti-essentialist,31opposed to assimilation, against racial integration,32 concerned with culture33 and cultural racism.34 All of these will be explored.
Overview CRT According to Other Critical Race Theorists
In the introduction to Critical Race Theory - the Key Writings That Formed the Movement (which we will sometimes abbreviate to CRT - Key Writings), it states35 about the various critical race theorists whose writings the book contains that
As these writings demonstrate, there is no canonical set of doctrines or methodologies to which we all subscribe. Although Critical Race Theory scholarship differs in object, argument, accent, and emphasis, it is nevertheless unified by two common interests.
The first is to understand how a regime of white supremacy and its subordination of people of color have been created and maintained in America, and, in particular, to examine the relationship between that social structure and professed ideals such as “the rule of law” and “equal protection.”
More along these lines below, particularly in the sections on race consciousness and racial realism. These critical race theorist editors continue,
The second is desire not merely to understand the vexed bond between law and racial power but to change it.
Above we saw a glimpse of Calmore’s treatment of these proactive, activist, confrontational and oppositional sides and we will explore them below.
These crit editors add the following, citing Alan Freeman to whom we will return in the history section,36
The aspect of our work which most markedly distinguishes it from conventional liberal and conservative legal scholarship about race and inequality is a deep dissatisfaction with traditional civil rights discourse. . . The construction of “racism” from what Alan Freeman terms the “perpetrator perspective” restrictively conceived racism as an intentional, albeit irrational, deviation by a conscious wrongdoer from an otherwise neutral, rational, and just ways of distributing jobs, power, prestige, and wealth. The adoption of this perspective allowed a broad cultural mainstream both explicitly to acknowledge the fact of racism and, simultaneously, to insist on its irregular occurrence and limited significance. As Freeman concludes, liberal race reform thus served to legitimize the basic myths of American meritocracy.
In Gary Peller’s depiction, this mainstream civil rights discourse on “race relations” was constructed in this way partly as a defense against the more radical ideologies of racial liberation presented by the Black Nationalist and Black Consciousnessmovements of the sixties and early seventies . . .
In the construction of “racism” as the irrational and backward bias of believing that someone’s race is important, the American cultural mainstream neatly linked the black left to the white racist right: according to this quickly coalesced consensus, because race-consciousness characterized both white supremacists and black nationalists, it followed that both were racists. The resulting “center” of cultural common sense thus rested on the exclusion of virtually the entire domain of progressive thinking about race within colored communities. With its explicit embrace of race-consciousness, Critical Race Theory aims to reexamine the terms by which race and racism have been negotiated in American consciousness, and to recover and revitalize the radical tradition of race-consciousness among African-Americans and other peoples of color - a tradition that was discarded when integration, assimilation and ideal of color-blindness became the official norms of racial enlightenment.
By now you get the idea that we will explore race consciousness below. A bit further on37 they make clear that they pose an
opposition to civil rights discourse
and go on to argue38 that civil rights reform - with the establishment of laws that establish that people are to be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character - is counter productive because they are too moderate. They express39 their unhappiness with civil rights reform for the role it
played in the deradicalization of racial liberation movements.
They go on to argue that laws against overt racism allow subtle racism to continue unchecked. In his formative essay Racial Realism in particular, the “intellectual father figure” of CRT,40 Derrick A. Bell Jr. argues that racial equality is impossible to achieve and that people would do well to give up on the hope.41 Critical race theorists do not offer a better alternative as far as I have been able to find after reading over 1,573 pages across 5 books and many essays worth of writing about CRT by critical race theorists (see the bibliography).
HISTORY of CRT
Postmodernism Paves the Way for CRT
A Brief Background in Postmodernism
Beginning of CRT & the Coining of the Term
From Radical Feminism & Critical Legal Studies to CRT
CRT’s Marxism
CRT’s Anti-Liberal Past & Present
Alternative Course
Foundational CRT
Postmodernism Paves the Way for CRT
A Brief Background in Postmodernism
In Cynical Theories - How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity and Why This Harms Everybody (first published in 2020),42 authors Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay expound43 upon the prehistory and history of
a radical worldview that came to be known as “postmodernism”
which, they they profess in detail, paved the way for CRT.
arguably emerged between 1950 and 1970 - the exact dates depending upon whether one is primarily interested in its artistic or social aspects. The earliest changes began in art - we can trace them as far back as the 1940s, in the words of artists such as Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges -
We go over a bit more postmodern prehistory and history in the section on postmodernism in the Culture War Encyclopedia than we do here but, as Pluckrose and Lindsay continue and with which I concur, it is he later 1960’s that are important for understanding poltical postmodernism because this is when history
witnessed the emergence of French social Theorists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Francois Lyotard.
and a “broad” skepticism, subjectivism and/or relativism along with a keen focus on the role ideology plays in the establishment and maintanance of economic and political power. We write that Britannica furthemore states that postmodernism is mainly
a reaction against the intellectual assumptions and values of the modern period in the history of Western philosophy (roughly, the 17th through the 19th century). Indeed, many of the doctrines characteristically associated with postmodernism can fairly be described as the straightforward denial of general philosophical viewpoints that were taken for granted during the 18th-century Enlightenment, though they were not unique to that period.
Britannica also states that the most important viewpoints of the 18th-century Enlightenment were that
1. There is an objective natural reality, a reality whose existence and properties are logically independent of human beings—of their minds, their societies, their social practices, or their investigative techniques. Postmodernists dismiss this idea as a kind of naive realism. Such reality as there is, according to postmodernists, is a conceptual construct, an artifact of scientific practice and language. This point also applies to the investigation of past events by historians and to the description of social institutions, structures, or practices by social scientists.
2. The descriptive and explanatory statements of scientists and historians can, in principle, be objectively true or false. The postmodern denial of this viewpoint—which follows from the rejection of an objective natural reality—is sometimes expressed by saying that there is no such thing as Truth.
3. Through the use of reason and logic, and with the more specialized tools provided by science and technology, human beings are likely to change themselves and their societies for the better. It is reasonable to expect that future societies will be more humane, more just, more enlightened, and more prosperous than they are now. Postmodernists deny this Enlightenment faith in science and technology as instruments of human progress. Indeed, many postmodernists hold that the misguided (or unguided) pursuit of scientific and technological knowledge led to the development of technologies for killing on a massive scale in World War II. Some go so far as to say that science and technology—and even reason and logic—are inherently destructive and oppressive, because they have been used by evil people, especially during the 20th century, to destroy and oppress others.
4. Reason and logic are universally valid—i.e., their laws are the same for, or apply equally to, any thinker and any domain of knowledge. For postmodernists, reason and logic too are merely conceptual constructs and are therefore valid only within the established intellectual traditions in which they are used.
5. There is such a thing as human nature; it consists of faculties, aptitudes, or dispositions that are in some sense present in human beings at birth rather than learned or instilled through social forces. Postmodernists insist that all, or nearly all, aspects of human psychology are completely socially determined.
6. Language refers to and represents a reality outside itself. According to postmodernists, language is not such a “mirror of nature,” as the American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty characterized the Enlightenment view. Inspired by the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, postmodernists claim that language is semantically self-contained, or self-referential: the meaning of a word is not a static thing in the world or even an idea in the mind but rather a range of contrasts and differences with the meanings of other words. Because meanings are in this sense functions of other meanings—which themselves are functions of other meanings, and so on—they are never fully “present” to the speaker or hearer but are endlessly “deferred.” Self-reference characterizes not only natural languages but also the more specialized “discourses” of particular communities or traditions; such discourses are embedded in social practices and reflect the conceptual schemes and moral and intellectual values of the community or tradition in which they are used. The postmodern view of language and discourse is due largely to the French philosopher and literary theorist Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), the originator and leading practitioner of deconstruction.
7. Human beings can acquire knowledge about natural reality, and this knowledge can be justified ultimately on the basis of evidence or principles that are, or can be, known immediately, intuitively, or otherwise with certainty. Postmodernists reject philosophical foundationalism—the attempt, perhaps best exemplified by the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes’s dictum cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”), to identify a foundation of certainty on which to build the edifice of empirical (including scientific) knowledge.
8. It is possible, at least in principle, to construct general theories that explain many aspects of the natural or social world within a given domain of knowledge—e.g., a general theory of human history, such as dialectical materialism. Furthermore, it should be a goal of scientific and historical research to construct such theories, even if they are never perfectly attainable in practice. Postmodernists dismiss this notion as a pipe dream and indeed as symptomatic of an unhealthy tendency within Enlightenment discourses to adopt “totalizing” systems of thought (as the French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas called them) or grand “metanarratives” of human biological, historical, and social development (as the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard claimed). These theories are pernicious not merely because they are false but because they effectively impose conformity on other perspectives or discourses, thereby oppressing, marginalizing, or silencing them. Derrida himself equated the theoretical tendency toward totality with totalitarianism.
We can look at these 8 viewpoints that postmodernism opposes according to Britannica - however applicable it may or may not be - as an 8 point description of postmodernism. Accordingly, postmodernism would involve:
a denial that reality exists outside of human conceptions about what they think of as reality
a denial that there is such thing as truth. History and science do not offer objective truth. That is, there is no such thing as THE truth, as in one single objective reality as opposed to false conceptions of reality
a denial of human progress and that which makes this progress possible: the Enlightenment ideals, reason, logic, science, technology, ethics, humanity and so on
a denial that logic and reason are universal, that they apply equally to all situations regardless of the cultural context, denial that this Enlightenment style view is not one of many incompatible but equally valid views, such as irrational and/or illogical world views
a denial that humans have some inherent nature, that they can be born heteroxual or homosexual, smart or dull, or that humans have many - if any - aspects that are not socially conditioned rather than biologically determined such as gender, artistic aptitude or athletic potential
a denial that language points to aspects of a reality that exists outside of language
a denial that we can begin with the dictum “I think, therefore I am” as a first principle and from there gain knowledge using evidence and principles supported by the first principle
a denial that it is possible, in principle or in practice, to construct theories with explanatory power. For example, the theory of gravity is of no use to us if we want to decide if we should jump off a cliff or not because the outcome is entirely uncertain and any theories about what may happen are equally valid. So, the views that we may fly if we jump off a cliff or be carried safely to the Jupiter by blue space crabs are no more or less valid that the view that we will fall to earth if we jump off a cliff.
postmodernism is difficult to define, perhaps by design
it does indeed seem they define the undefinable in their first chapter, 1 POSTMODERNISM, by laying out what they say are the 2 principles and 4 themes of postmodernism46 (to which we will return) after presenting the 4 pillars of postmodernism according to Walter Truen Anderson47 and the central themes of postmodernism according to Steinar Kvale, director of the Center of Qualitative Research and professor of psychology.48
They write49 that author Walter Anderson’s 4 pillars of postmodernism are as follows,
The social construction of the concept of the self: Identity is constructed by many cultural forces and is not given to a person by tradition;
Relativism of moral and ethical discourse: Morality is not found but made. That is, morality is not base on cultural or religious tradition, nor is it the mandate of Heaven, but is constructed by dialogue and choice. This is relativism, not in the sense of being nonjudgmental, but in the sense of believing that all forms of morality are socially constructed cultural worldviews;
Deconstruction in art and culture: The focus is on endless playful improvisation and variations on themes and a mixing of “high” and “low” culture; and
Globalization: People see borders of all kinds as social constructions that can be crossed and reconstructed and are inclined to take their tribal norms less seriously.50
They write51 that according to Steinar Kvale, director of the Center of Qualitative Research and professor of psychology, the central themes of postmodernism include:
Doubt that human truths can accurately represent reality
Denial of the universal (plurality)
Societies (plural) use language to create their own local realities (plural)
They go on to write52 that Kvale explains that these central themes of postmodernism
resulted in an increased interest in narrative and storytelling, particularly when “truths” are situated within particular cultural constructs, and a relativism that accepts that different descriptions of reality cannot be measured against one another in any final - that is, objective - way.53
The key observation, following54 is that the postmodern turn brought about an important shift away from the modernist dichotomy between the objective universal and the subjective individual and toward local narratives (and the lived experiences of their narrators). In other words, the boundary between that which is objectively true and that which is subjectively experienced ceased to be accepted. The perception of society as formed of individuals interacting with universal reality in unique ways - which underlies the liberal principles of individual freedom, shared humanity, and equal opportunities - was replaced by multiple allegedly equally valid knowledges and truths, constructed by groups of people with shared markers of identity related to their positions in society. Knowledge, truth, meaning, and morality are therefore, according to postmodernist thinking, culturally constructed and relative products of individual cultures, none of which posses the necessary tools or terms to evaluate the others.
To return to the 2 principles and 4 themes of postmodernism according to Pluckrose and Lindsay, they offer their own description of these in Cynical Theories55 beginning with an acknowledgement that postmodernists can be strikingly different in their approach to their reaction to Enlightenment thought with regard to objective knowledge and universal truths in particular. They write that despite this, a handful of themes running through postmodernist ‘discourse’ can be discerned. They name and describe as we’ll see. They also write56 that the postmodernism involves, at its core, 2 inseparable principles and 4 themes.
The 2 principles of postmodernism are:
the postmodernknowledge principle
and
the postmodern political principle
and the 4 major themes of postmodernism are:
The blurring of boundaries
The power of language
Cultural relativism
The loss of the individual & the universal
They write about these57 that together, with these 2 principles and 4 themes, we can recognize postmodern conception and comprehend its workings. According to them,58 these fundamental principles of “Theory” have survived, mostly unaltered, since its deconstructive early days to the zealous activism of the two thousand teens and two thousand twenties. They write59 that this
arose from various theoretical approaches in the humanities, particularly that going by the term “cultural studies,” mainly over the last century, and developed into the postmodernist Social Justice scholarship, activism, and culture we see today.
We will now look at Pluckrose’s and Lindsay’s 2 principles and 4 themes at some depth.
Principle 1 - The PostmodernKnowledge Principle
Pluckrose and Lindsay write60 of the postmodern knowledge principle that it is
radical skepticism about whether objective knowledge or truth is obtainable and a commitment to cultural constructivism
which, they write,61 leads to a preoccupation with the 4 main themes as they see it. We will return to these 4 main themes below. For now, we must note that as postmodernism - or at least as influential thinkers who were influenced by postmodern thinkers - became focused on activism (“applied postmodernism”), this principle was modified. They write62 that this principle
has been largely retained, with one important provisio: under applied postmodern thought, identity and oppression based on identity are treated as known features of objective reality. That is, the conception of society as comprised of systems of power and privilege that construct knowledge is assumed to be objetively true and intrinsically tied to social constructions of identity.
We will look at applied postmodernism in an other section ahead. Earlier, they wrote63 that
postmodern approaches to knowledge inflate a small, almost banal kernel of truth - that we are limited in our ability to know and must must express knowledge through language, concepts and categories - to insist that all claims to truth are value-laden constructs of culture. This is called cultural constructivism or social constructivism. The scientific method, in particular, is not seen as a better way of producing and legitimizing knowledge than any other, but as one cultural approach among any, as corrupted by biased reasoning as any other.
science is an enormously successful human enterprise. The study of scientific method is the attempt to discern the activities by which that success is achieved.
any system of knowledge that is concerned with the physical world and its phenomena and that entails unbiased observations and systematic experimentation.
Even a dog can experiment with different strategies in attempt to open a bag of doggie treats. A toddler can experiment in a systematic and rational manner to gain access to a high shelf to obtain a box of cookies and the contents therein. The point is that the scientific approach is universal, not culture bound. Some people may argue otherwise. These same people would not be likely to choose an Amazonian Witoto healer over a UPMC oncologist to treat their brain tumor were they to have one and be forced to choose one or the other. Imagine a postmodernist who subscribes to cultural relativism has a very painful toothache. You offer to pay for professional dentist appointment or pay for a new age crystal healer to deal with the issue. Which will they choose?
Imagine that a tribe on the other side of the river believes that if you hold 2 nuts or berries in one hand and 2 nuts or berries in the other hand, you hold a total of 5 nuts or berries. Is this view just as valid as your tribe’s view that 2 nuts/berries plus 2 more nute/berries adds up to 4 nuts/berries. Your tribe can respect the other trib’s righ to believe whatever they want, but when it comes time to trade nuts and berries with that tribe, reality will make itself known and undeniable. A postmodernist may say that the view that 2 = 2 = 4 for all tribes, all cultures and all people is a metanarrative. If that is a metanarrative, then this demonstrates the invalidity of the anti-metanarrative view.
Cultural constructivism is not the belief that reality is literally created by cultural beliefs - it doesn’t argue, for instance, that when we erroneously believed that the Sun went around the Earth, our beliefs had any influence over the solar system and its dynamics. Instead, it is the position that humans are so tied into their cultural frameworks that all truth or knowledge claims are merely representations of those frameworks - we have decided that “it is true” or “it is known” that the Earth goes round the Sun because of the way we establish truth in our current culture. That is, although reality doesn’t change in accordance with our beliefs, what does change is what we are able to regard as true (or false - or “crazy”) about reality. If we belonged to a culture that produced and legitimated knowledge differently, within that cultural paradigm it might be “true” that, say, the Sun goes around the Earth. Those who would be regarded as “crazy” to disagree would change accordingly.
postmodernism rests upon a broad rejection of the correspondence theory of truth: that is, the position that there are objective truths and that they can be established as true by their correspondence with how things actually are in the world.66(FOOTNOTE: Here the authors place this footnote: Rorty makes this case ten years earlier in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979) That there are real truths about an objective reality “out there” and that we can come to know them is, of course, at the root of Enlightenment thinking and central to the development of science. Profoundly radical skepticism about this idea is central to postmodern thinking about knowledge.
French philosopher Michel Foucault - a central figure of postmodernism - expresses this same doubt when he argues that, “in any given culture at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the contradictions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice.”67 Foucault was especially interested in the relationship between language, or, more specifically, discourse (ways of talking about things), the production of knowledge, and power. He explored these ideas at length throughout the 1960s, in such influential works as Madness and Civilization (1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963), The Order of Things (1966), and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969).68 For Foucault, a statement reveals not just information but also the rules and conditions of a discourse. These then determine the construction of truth claims and knowledge. Dominant discourses are extremely powerful; because they determine what can be considered true, thus applicable, in a given time and place. Thus, sociopolitical power is the ultimate determiner of what is true in Foucault’s analysis, not correspondence with reality. Foucault was so interested in the concept of how power influences what is considered knowledge that in 1981 he coined the term “power-knowledge” to convey the inextricable link between powerful discourses and what is known. Foucault called a dominant set of ideas and values an episteme because it shapes how we identify and interact with knowledge.
In The Order of Things, Foucault argues against objective notions of truth and suggests we think instead of in terms of “regimes of truth,” which change according to the specific episteme of each culture and time. As a result, Foucault adopted the position that there are no fundamental principles by which to discover truth and that all knowledge is “local” to the knower69 - ideas which form the basis of the postmodern knowledge principle. Foucault didn’t deny that a reality exists, but he doubted the ability of humans to transcend our cultural biases enough to get at it.
The main takeaway from all this is that postmodern skepticism is not garden-variety skepticism, which might also be called “reasonable doubt.” The kind of skepticism employed in the sciences and other rigorous means of producing knowledge asks, “How can I be sure this proposition is true?” and will only tentatively accept as a provisional truth that which survives repeated attempts to disprove it. These propositions are put forth in models, which are understood to be provisional conceptual constructs, which are used to explain and predict phenomena and are judged according to their ability to do so. The principle of skepticism common among postmodernists is frequently referred to as “radical skepticism.” It says, “All knowledge is constructed: what is interesting is theorizing about why knowledge got constricted this way.” Thus, radical skepticism is markedly different from the scientific skepticism that characterized the Enlightenment. The postmodern view wrongly insists that scientific thought is unable to distinguish itself as especially reliable and rigorous in determining what is and isn’t true.70 Scientific reasoning is construed as a metanarrative - a sweeping explanation of how things work - and postmodernism is radically skeptical of all such explanations. In postmodern thinking, that which is known is only known within the cultural paradigm that produced the knowledge and is therefore representative of its systems of power. As a result, postmodernism regards knowledge as provincial and intrinsically political.
This view is widely attributed to the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, who critiqued science, the Enlightenment, and Marxism. Each of these projects was, for Lyotard, a prime example of a modernist or Enlightenment metanarrative. Ultimately, Lyotard feared that science and technology were just one “language game” - one way of legitimating truth claims - and that they were taking over all other language games. He mourned the demise of small local “knowledges” passed on in narrative form and viewed the loss of meaning-making intrinsic to scientific detachment as a loss of valuable narratives. Lyotard’s famous characterization of postmodernism as a “skepticism towards metanarratives” has been extremely influential on the development of postmodernism as a school of thought, analytical tool, and worldview.71
This was the great postmodern contribution to knowledge and knowledge production. It did not invent the skeptical reevaluation of well-established beliefs. It did, however, fail to appreciate that scientific and other forms of literal reasoning (such as arguments in favor of democracy and capitalism) are not so much metanarratives (though they can adopt these) as imperfect but self-correcting processes that apply a productive and actionable form of skepticism to everything, including themselves. This mistake led them into their equally misguided political project.
This generalized skepticism about the objectivity of truth and knowledge - and commitment to regarding both as culturally constructed - leads to a preoccupation with four main themes: the blurring of boundaries, the power of language, cultural relativism, and the loss of the individual and the universal in favor of group identity.
We will enumerate and describe these after the 2nd principle below.
Principle 2 - The PostmodernPolitical Principle
Pluckrose and Lindsay write73 (Page 31) of the postmodern political principle that it is
a belief that society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies which decide what can be known and how.
For a concrete example, consider Facebook or Youtube where one can be sanctioned for discussing certain matters. Facebook states that “hate speech” is not allowed on their platform. Youtube also states as much. What is “hate speech”? Stating “men are not women” for example, or discussing any number of partisan issues can cause Facebook and/or Youtube to silence a person. Additionally, people have been punished by their banks and other financial services in full swing of the authoritarian left curve. See Financial Unpersoning by Justin Trouble for more on that.
Also, Facebook, Youtube presumed to decide what cold or could not be communicated about the flu-19. One could not discuss COVID-19 unless one only expressed views that conform to a very narrow officially sanctioned range. Try to do a search, for example, on“restrictions on covid discussion on facebook youtube”. In 2019, my official Twitter account was suspended forever because I refused to delete a tweet wherein I wrote that Martin Luther King Jr was against riots and included a video clip of an interview wherein Dr. King makes that perfectly clear. It was in the context of a thread where a lot of leftists were arguing that MLK said that “riots are the language of the unheard”, which Dr. King did indeed say right before he condemned them. I have repeatedly been suspended from both Facebook and Youtube for stating facts like “Islam does not mean peace, it means submission” and I have been permanently kicked off Facebook for something factually correct but triggering. I forget what it exactly it was because I had been suspended so many times for rediculous reasons.
I used Facebook and Youtube to communicate things that many people would not otherwise know. I had a few thousand friends on Facebook before they kicked me off and on Youtube I have about 23,000 subscribers and about 14,000,000 views before they shadowbanned me. (FOOTNOTE) Much of what I communicated was, to my knowledge, not communicated by anyone else.(FOOTNOTE) In some cases, I communicated to the viewers my own exclusives, exposés and so on.
What can not be communicated can not be known. If one is punished for communicating certain things or terrorized into not discussing certain things, those things will become obscure and unknown. People have been punished for communicating wrongthink by having their ability to communicate limited or blocked. Some have been punished for communicating wrongthink through what I call Financial Unpersoning.
They silenced Julian Assange, did they not? They sabotaged James O’Keefe and his Project Veritas. (SEE FOORNOTE) On August 6, 2018, Apple, Facebook, Spotify and Youtube all kicked Alex Jones off their platforms.[FOOTNOTE: August 6, 2018NOTE TO SELF - DID THEY CITE DIFFERENT REASONS AND DIFFERENT CONTENT FROM JONES? IF O THEN IT’S NOT AS IF JONES ONE DAY DID SOMETHING PARTICULARLY BAD AND THAT’S WHY THEY ALL BANNED HIM ON THE SAME DAY] I am sure they did not plan that with each other because that would require that they conspire and we all know that it is crazy to believe that people or groups would conspire. That’s insane. Nobody makes agreement in secret for mutual benefit. Conspiracy theories are for right-wing nut-jobs. Besides, Twitter waited until the 6th of the following month before axing Jones so it was not a conspiracy.
The media is directly or indirectly controlled by the government and that
Censorship is very common
The point here is that at least to some degree, it is indeed true that systems of power decide what can and can not be known.
Getting back to Pluckrose and Lindsay, they also write75 of the postmodern political principle that it involves the belief
that powerful forces in society essentially order society into categories hierarchies that are organized to serve their own interests. They effect this by dictating how society and its features can be spoken about and what can be accepted as true. For example, a demand that a someone provide evidence and reasoning for their claims will be seen through a postmodernist Theoretical lens as a request to participate in a system of discourses and knowledge production that was built by powerful people who valued these approaches and designed them to exclude alternative means of communicating and producing “knowledge.” In other words, Theory views science as having been organized in a way that serves the interests of the powerful people who established it - white Western men - while setting up barriers against the participation of others. Thus, the cynicism at the heart of Theory is evident.
This seems to imply that unlike others, Western man is rational and scientific. This is clearly not so. Non-Western culture has been rational and scientific. Also, like all others, Western culture can be quite irratonal and unscientific.
Also, this argument that the rational, scientific narrative of things is no more valid than alternatives seems to be an attempt to give college students and leftists in general an excuse to disregard reality when it serves them to do so. They can identify as a transabled cat for which 2 + 2 = 5.
Postmodernism is characterized politically by its intense focus on power as the guiding and structuring force of society, a focus which is codependent on the denial of objective knowledge. Power and knowledge are seen as inextricably entwined - most explicitly in Foucault’s work, which refers to knowledge as “power knowledge.” Lyotard also describes a “strict interlinkage”77 between the language of science and that of politics and ethics, and Derrida was profoundly interested in the power dynamics embedded in hierarchal binaries of superiority and subordination that he believed exist within language. Similarly, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari saw humans as coded within various systems of power and constraints and free to operate only within capitalism and the flow of money. In this sense, for postmodern Theory, power decides not only what is factually correct but also what is morally good - power implies domination, which is bad, whereas subjugation implies oppression, the disruption of which is good. These attitudes were prevailing mood at the Sorbonne in Paris through the 1960s, where many of the early Theorists were strongly intellectually influenced.
postmodernists do not necessarily see the system of oppression as the result of a consciously coordinated, patriarchal, white supremacist, heteronormativeconspiracy. Instead, they regard it as the inevitable result of self-perpetuating systems that privilege some groups over others, which constitute an unconscious, uncoordinated conspiracy inherent to systems involving power. They believe, however, that those systems are patriarchal, white supremacist, and heteronormative, and therefore necessarily grant unfair access to straight, white Western men and work to maintain that statues quo by excluding the perspectives of women and of racial and sexual minorities.
postmodern Theory runs the overtly left-wing idea that oppressive power structures constrain humanity and are to be deplored. This results in an ethical imperative to deconstruct, challenge, problematize (find and exaggerate the problems within), and resist all ways of thinking that support oppressive structures of power, the categories relevant to power structures, and the language that perpetuates them - thus embedding a value system into what might have been a moderately useful descriptive theory.
This impulse generates a parallel drive to prioritize the narratives, systems, and knowledges of marginalized groups.
Along these lines, and to make their point, they quote Foucault,80 as an example;
“…my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper - and pessimistic activism…”
Postmodernism did not invent ethical opposition to oppressive power systems and hierarchies - in fact, much of the most significant social and ethical progress occurred during the preceding periods that it rejects and continues to be brought about by applying the methods of liberalism. The postmodern approach to ethically driven social critique is intangible and unfalsifiable.
It seems fair to add that some of it is not ethically driven but rather predeliction toward nihilistic tantrums. But this is beside their point here, that postmodernism is not about truth. Nor is it a philosophy by definition, at least according to those who are considered to be the most important of the postmodernists.
4 Major Themes of Postmodernism
Again, Pluckrose and Lindsay wrote that from the Postmodern Knowledge Principle (described above) came,a preccupatiom with 4 main themes of posmodernism.82
Radical skepticism as to the possibility of objective truth and knowledge, combined with a belief in cultural constructivism in service of power, results in a suspicion of all the boundaries and categories that previous thinkers widely accepted as true. These include not only the boundaries between objective and subjective and between truth and belief, but also those between science and the arts (especially for Lyotard), the natural and the artificial (particularly for Baudrillard and Jameson), high and low and culture (see Jameson), man and other animals, and man and machine (in Deleuze), and between different underdstandings of sexuality and gender as well as health and sickness (see, especially, Foucault). Almost every socially significant category has been intentionally complicated and problematized by postmodern Theorists in order to deny such categories any objective validity and disrupt the systems of power that might exist across them.
They add84 that in the case of “applied postmodernism,” the blurring the boundaries theme
is most evident in postcolonial and queer Theories, which are both explicitly centered on ideas of fluidity, ambiguity, indefinability, and hybridity - all of which blur or even demolish the boundaries between categories. Their common concern with what they call “disrupting boundaries” follows from Derrida’s work on the hierarchal nature and meaninglessness of linguistic constructions. this theme is less evident in critical race Theory, which can be quite black-and-white (double meaning intended), but, in practice, the intersectional feminist element of critical race Theory encompasses many identity categories simultaneously and tries to be inclusive of “different ways of knowing".” This results in a messy mixing of the evidenced with experiential, in which a personal intepretationof lived experience (often informed - or misinformed - in Theory) is elevated to the status of evidence (usually of Theory).
Under postmodernism, many ideas that had previously been regarded as objectively true came to be seen as mere constructions of language. Foucault refers to them as “discourses” that construct knowledge; Lyotard, expanding upon Wittgenstein, calls them “language games” that legitimize knowledges. In postmodern thought, language is believed to have enormous power to control society and how we think and thus is inherently dangerous. It is also seen as an unreliable way of producing and transmitting knowledge.
The obsession with language is at the heart of postmodern thinking and key to its methods. Few thinkers exhibit the neurotic postmodern fixation upon words more explicitly than Jacques Derrida, echo, in 1967, published three texts - Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena - in which he introduced a concept that would become very influential in post modernism: deconstruction. In these works, Derrida rejects the commonsense idea that words refer straightforwardly to things in the real world.(34) Instead, he insists that words refer only to other words and to the ways in which they differ from one another, thus forming chains of “signifiers.” which can go off all directions with no anchor - this being the meaning of his famous and often-mistranslated phrase, “there is nothing [read: no meaning] outside of text.”(35) For Derrida, meaning is always relational and deferred, and can never be reached and exists only in relation to the discourse in which it is emdedded. This unreliability of language, Derrida argues, means that it cannot represent reality or communicate it to others.
In this understanding, language operates hierarchically through binaries, always placing one element above another to make meaning. For example, “man” is defined in opposition to “woman” and taken to be superior. Additionally, for Derrida, the speaker’s meaning has no more outweigh impact. Thus, if someone says that there are certain features of a culture that can generate problems, and I choose to interpret this statement as a dog whistle about the inferiority of that culture and take offense, there is no space in Derridean analysis to insist that my offense followed from a misunderstanding of what had been said. The author’s intentions are irrelevant, when those can be known, due to Derrida’s adaptation of Roland Barthes’ concept of “the death of the author.”(36) Consequently, since discourses are believed to create and maintain oppression, they have to be carefully monitored and deconstructed. This has obvious implications for moral and political action.
The most common postmodernist response to this derives from Derrida’s proposed solution: to read “deconstructively,” by looking for internal inconsitencies (aporia) in which a text contradicts and undermines itself and its own purposes when the words are examined closely enough (which is to say, too closely and, especially since the 1990s, with an agenda - Theory’s normative agenda). In practice, deconstructive approaches to language therefore look very much like nipicking at words in order to deliberately miss the point.
They write furthermore86 that with “applied postmodernism,” the power of language theme
The power and danger of language are foregrounded in all the newer applied postmodern Theories. “Discourse analysis” plays a central role in all those fields; scholars scrutinize language closely and interpret it according to Theoretical frameworks. For example, many films are watched “closely” for problematic portrayals and then disparaged, even if their themes are broadly consistent with Social Justice.(32) Additionally, the idea that words are powerful and dangerous has now become widespread and underlies much scholarship and activismaround discursive (or verbal) violance, safe spaces, microaggressions, and trigger warnings.
Because, in postmodern Theory, truth and knowledge are believed to have been constructed by the dominant discourses and language gaes that operate within society, and because we cannot step putside our own system and categories and therefore have no vantage point from which to examine them, Theory insists that no one set of cultural norms can be said to be better than any other. For postmodernists, any meaningful critiques of a culture’s values and ethics from within a different cultureis impossible, since each culture operates under different concepts of knowledge and speaks only from its own biases. All such critique is therefore erroneous at best and a moral infraction at worst, since it presipposes one’s own culture to be objectively superior.
Moreover, Theory insists that although sone can critique oen’s own culture from within the system, one can only do so using discourses available in that system, which limits its ability to change. Which discourses one can use is largely dependendent on one’s position within the sytem, therefore critiques can be accepted or dismissed depending on a politival assessement of the status of the critic’s position. In particular, criticism from any position deemed powerful tends to be dismissed because it is asssumed either to be ignorant (or dismissive) of tthe realities of oppression, by definition, or a cynical attempt to serve the critic’s own interests. The postmodern belief that individuals are vehicles of dosciurses of power, depending on where they stand in relation to power, makes cultural critique completely hopeless except as a weapon in the hand of those Theorized to be marginalized or oppressed.
They add88 that in the case of “applied postmodernism,” the cultural relativist theme
Cultural relativism is, or course, most pronounced in postcolonial Theory, but the widespread use of intersectionality in Social Justice scholarship and activism and he understanding of the West as the pinnacle of an oppressive power structure have made cultural relativism a norm in all oppressive power structure have made cultural relativism a norm in all applied postmodern Theories. This applies both in terms of how knowledge is produced, recognized, and transmitted - one cultural artifact - and in terms of how knowledge is produced, recognized, and transmitted - one cultural artifact - and in terms of moral and eithical principles - another cultural artifact.
Theme 4 - The Loss of the Individual & the Universal
Consequently to postmodern Theorists, the notion of the autonomous individual is largely a myth. The individual, like everything else, is a product of powerful discourses and culturally constructed knowledge. Equally, the concept of the universal - whether a biological universal about human nature; or an ethical universal, such as equal rights, freedoms, and opportunities for all individuals regardless of class, race, gender, or sexuality - is, at best, naive. At worst, it is merely another exercise in power-knowledge, an attempt to enforce dominant discourses on everybody. The postmodernist view largely rejects both the smallest unit of society - the individual - and the largest - humanity - and instead focus on small, local groups as the producers of knowledge, values, and discourses. Therefore, postmodernism focuses on sets of people who are understood to be positioned in the sane way - by race, sex, or class, for example - and have the same experiences and perceptions due to this positioning.
They write,89 with regard to “applied postmodernism”,
The intense focus on identity categories and identity politics means that the individual and the universal are largely devalued. While mainstream liberalism focuses on achieving universal human rights and access to opportunities, to allow each individual to fulfill their potential, applied postmodern scholarship and activism is deeply skeptical of these values and even openly hostile to them. Applied postmodedern Theory tends to regard mainstram liberalism as complacent, naive, or indifferent about the deeply ingrained prejudices, assumptions, and biases that limit and constrain people with marginalized identities. The “individual” in applied postmodernism is something like the sum total of the identity groups to which the person in question simultaneously belongs.
They expand on what they see as the 2 principles and 4 themes of postmodernism through much of the rest of the chapter.
In their chapter, 2 POSTMODERNISM’S APPLIED TURN, in the section THE POSTMODERN PRINCIPLES AND THEMES IN ACTION, they revise the 2 principles and 4 themes where needed to reflect how, in what they call applied postmodernism, these are, well, applied.
you can see more about this describee stuffs in the section “NAME” in the section on postmodernism in the CWE
Also, they state90 that rather than dying out, postmodernism, in the form of the ideas they lay out in 1 Postmodernism,
evolved and diversified into distinct strands - the cynical Theories we have to live with today - and became more goal-oriented and actionable. For this reason, we call the next wave of activism-scholarship applied postmodernism, and it is to this development we now turn our attention.
In the following chapter, 2 Postmodernism’s Applied Turn,
They write that postmodernism metastasized into social justice scholarship and activism (pages 23)
the roots of the tree that would eventually yield the nut that is CRT. They discuss the r
deconstructionism (pages 23, 45)
Beginning of CRT & the Coining of the Term
According to the editors of Critical Race Theory - the Key Writings That Formed the Movement, critical race theory emerged in the 1980s.91 However, critical race theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic write92 in Critical Race Theory - an Introduction,
Critical race theory sprang up in the 1970s, as a number of lawyers, activists, and legal scholars across the country realized, more or less simultaneously, that the heady advances of the civil rights era of the 1960s had stalled and, in many respects, were being rolled back. Realizing that new theories and strategies were needed to combat the subtler forms of racism that were gaining ground, early writers, such as Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, and Richard Delgado, put their minds to the task. They were soon joined by others, and the group held its first workshop at a convent outside Madison, Wisconsin, in the summer of 1989. Further conferences and meetings took place.
Derrick A. Bell Jr.. Photo by John Chapin
While these authors disagree whether CRT began in the 1970s or the 1980s, they agree that CRT has roots in the the critical legal studies movement in the 1970s and in the 1980s when, according to the editors of CRT - Key Writings, the term ‘critical race theory’ was coined as such by the organizers of the “Critical Race Theory Workshop” to make it clear that the field occupies the
intersection of critical theory and race, racism and the law.
Below is a Venn diagram we made to depict this intersectional description of CRT.
From Radical Feminism & Critical Legal Studies to Critical Race Theory
critical race theory builds on the insights of two previous movements, critical legal studies and radical feminism, to both of which it owes a large debt. It also draws from certain European philosophers and theorists, such as Antonio Gramsci, Michael Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, as well as from the American radical tradition exemplified by such figures as Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglas, W. E. B. Du Bois, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Black Power and Chicano movements of the sixties and early seventies. From critical legal studies, the group borrowed the idea of legal indeterminacy - the idea that not every legal case has one correct outcome. . .
The group also built on feminism’s insights into the relationship between power and the construction of social roles, as well as the unseen, largely invisible collection of patterns and habits that make up patriarchy and other types of domination. From conventional civil rights thought, the movement took a concern for redressing historical wrongs, as well as the insistence that legal and social theory lead to practical consequences. CRT also shared with it a sympathetic understanding of notions of community and group empowerment. From ethnic studies, it took notions such as cultural nationalism, group cohesion, and the need to develop ideas and texts centered around each group and its situation.
third-wave feminists fault past thinkers for not taking into consideration issues of race since women from certain racial groups are doubly disadvantaged in contemporary culture. This has led to the rise of Black Feminism, particularly Critical Race Theory (see intesectionality, Matrix of Domination, whiteness as property).
In the book CRT - Key Writings, there is much regarding the emergence of critical race theory from critical legal studies. Some of it pertains to the tension95 and separation of these 2 branches of critical theory. Most of this is contained in the 4 essays in Part 2. Critical Race Theory andCritical Legal Studies: Contestation and Coalition.96 It would, however, be too esoteric here and sidetrack us needlessly.
Although Critical Race Theory (CRT) started as an offshoot of CLS, it has largely eclipsed that school of thought and has become the dominant way of approaching such legal questions.
CLS, which was an active school of critical theory in the 1970s and 1980s applied poststructuralist and Marxist strategies to critique legal institutions, questioning the extent to which one can separate law and politics while illustrating the ways that the legal system is designed to support the dominant class at the expense of marginalized, subaltern groups.
The introduction of Critical Race Theory - the Key Writings That Formed the Movement, written by key figures in CRT (see the Appendix), discusses the emergence of critical race theory from critical legal studies (CLS) in the 1980s.101 They write102 about CLS that
a predominantly white left emerged on the law school scene in the late seventies, a development which played a central role in the genesis of Critical Race Theory. Organized by a collection of neo-Marxist intellectuals, former New Left activists, ex-counter-culturalists, and other varieties of oppositionists in law schools, the Conference on Legal Studies established itself as a network of openly leftist law teachers, students, and practitioners committed to exposing and challenged the ways American law served to legitimize an oppressive social order.
CRT’s Anti-Liberal Past & Present
The editors of CRT - Key Writings immediately continue,103
Like the later experience of Critical Race writers vis-a-vis race scholarship, “crits” found themselves frustrated with the presuppositions of the conventional scholarly legal discourse: they opposed not only conservative legal work but also the dominant liberal varieties. Crits contended that liberal and conservative legal scholarship operated in the narrow ideological channel within which law was understood as qualitatively different from politics. The faith of liberal lawyers in the gradual reform of American law through the victory of superior rationality of progressive ideas depended on a belief in the central ideological myth of the law/politics distinction, namely, that legal institutions employ a rational, apolitical, and neutral discourse with which to mediate the exercise of social power. This, in essence, is the role of law as understood by liberal political theory. Yet politics was embedded in the very doctrinal categories with which law organized and represented social reality.
The term “crit” used in the quote above is later104 defined (along with alternate term “CLSer”) to refer to attendees of the Conference of Critical Legal Studies (founded 1976) who are
a group of law teachers, students, and some practitioners (“crits,” “CLSers”), who are loosely organized as leftist intellectuals and activists
CRT is careful to distinguish its goals from those of liberal civil rights scholarship and activism. Although it takes inspiration from earlier civil rights agitation, the practitioners of CRT “take racial power of color are concentrated but also in the institutions where their position is normalized and given legitimation” (Crenshaw et al. 1995: xxii). Critiquing the liberal view that law is separate from politics became of its purported adherence to neutral and apolitical rational debate, CRT argues that the problem lies with the law itself is conceived. The goal, then, is not just to change the law, as in the civil rights movement, but also to uncover “how law was a constitutive element of race itself: in other words, how law constructed race” (xxv).
The Alternative Course
In Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, the editors write,106
two key institutional events in the development of Critical Race Theory as a movement.
The first is the student protest, boycott, and organization of an alternative course on race and law at Harvard Law School in 1981 - an event that highlights the significance of Derrick Bell and the Critical Legal Studies movement to the ultimate development of Critical Race Theory, and symbolizes Critical Race Theory’s oppositional posture vis-a-vis the liberal mainstream.
It may need to be clarified that they mean that in 1981, students at Harvard Law School protested and boycotted an already existing course and started their own course about race and law. Here the editors refer to it as “an alternative course”. Later, they refer to as “the Alternative Course”. They write that the Alternative Course was 3 weeks long and that it was conducted as a sort of protest against the university’s decision to fill a newly a vacant position with the most qualified candidate based on merit alone. They wanted the most qualified black candidate to fill the post.107 Note that when they write of “Bell” below, they are referring to the same Derrick A. Bell Jr.. They write,108
In the local Harvard confrontation, student organizers decided to boycott the mini-course offered by the administration and organized instead “The Alternative Course,” a student-led continuation of Bell’s course which focused on American law through the prism of race. Taught by scholars of color from other schools who were each asked to speak about topics loosely organized to trace the chapters of Bell’s Race, Racism and American Law book, the course simultaneously provided the means to develop a framework to understand law and racial power and to contest Harvard’s deployment of meritocratic mythology as an instance of that very power.
The Alternative Course was in many ways the first institutionalized expression of Critical Race Theory. With the aid of outside funding and sympathetic Harvard teachers (many of them white crits who provided encouragement, strategic advice, and independent study credit to enable students to attend the classes) the course brought together a critical mass of scholars and students, and focused on the need to develop an alternative account of racial power and its relation to law and antidiscrimination reform. Among the guest speakers were Charles Lawrence, Linda Greene, Neil Gotanda, and Richard Delgado, all of whom were already in law teaching. Mari Matsuda, then a graduate law student, was a participant in the Alternative Course, and Kimberle’ Crenshaw one of its main organizers.
The Alternative Course is a useful point to mark the genesis of Critical Race Theory for many reasons. First, it was one of the earliest attempts to bring scholars of color together to address the law’s treatment of race from a self- consciously critical perspective. . .
Second, the Alternative Course exemplified another important feature of Critical Race Theory movement, namely, the view - shared with the Critical Legal Studies movement - that it is politically meaningful to contest the terrain and terms of dominant legal discourse. . .
Finally, the Alternative Course embodied one of the key markers of Critical Race Theory - the way in which our intellectual trajectories are rooted in in a dissatisfaction with and opposition to liberal mainstream discourses about race such as those presented by the Harvard administration. . .
. . . the Alternative Course symbolizes the trajectory of Critical Race Theory as a left intervention in conventional race discourse
two key institutional events in the development of Critical Race Theory as a movement.
was
the 1987 Critical Legal Studies National Conference on silence and race, which marked the genesis of an intellectually distinctive critical account of race on terms set forth by race-conscious scholars of color, and the terms of contestation and coalition with CLS.
In other words, this was when critical race theory branched off or broke off from critical legal studies.
Foundational CRT
Derrick Bell & Criticism of Racial Desegregation
Alan Freeman & Criticism of Racial Desegregation
Derrick Bell & Interest Convergence
Richard Delgado & Unconscious Racism
SUMMARYof CRT’s FOUNDATION - CRT Opposes Race Neutrality & Civil Rights
Critical Race Theory’s engagement with the discourse of civil rights reform stemmed directly from our lived experience as students and teachers in the nation’s law schools.
Indeed, the first section of writings in CRT - Key Writings contains 4 formative essays from law students/teachers. This collection is titled Intellectual Precursors: Early Criticism of Civil Rights Discourse.
The great crusade to desegregate the public schools has faltered. There is increasing opposition to desegregation at local and national levels (not all of which can now be simply condemned as “racist”)
In the last analysis, blacks must provide an enforcement mechanism that will give educational content to the constitutional right recognized in Brown. Simply placing black children in “white” schools will seldom suffice.
In 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois, in the course of a national debate over the education of blacks - a debate that has not been significantly altered by Brown - expressed simply but eloquently the message. . .
“[T]he Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is Education. “
“Serving Two Masters,” appropriately sets the stage for the eventual development of Critical Race Theory. . .
For black scholars to pose values of a “quality education” against “integration” in the 1970s, he risked being branded, at best, an apologist for segregated education, and at worst, an accomplice to racist resistance to integration. As Bell illustrates, however, one need not share any sympathies with segregationists to question the utility of a singular focus on integrating schools. All that was necessary was a race-conscious perspective that focused on the effect of integration on the black community. That change in perspective is the intellectual starting point of Critical Race Theory.
classic example of a Critical Legal Studies approach and an important intellectual precursor to Critical Race Theory.
Like Bell’s essay discussed above and his essay mentioned below, this essay by Freeman is critical of anti-discrimination laws. More on this below.
Derrick Bell & Interest Convergence
Bell’s essay Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemmawas published January 11, 1980 in the Harvard Law Review.125 This was included in CRT - Key Writings126 and ranked in the Intellectual Precursors: Early Criticism of Civil Rights Discourse section as second only to his 1976 essay discussed above in importance the emergence of critical race theory.127 The focus of this essay is in ‘interest-convergence’ in terms of racial desegregation. The idea is that white society will only allow for racial desegregation or other such things when it serves their own interest. When the interests of one group converge with that of the dominant group, this can be called ‘interest convergence’. As Delgado and Stefancic write in CRT - an Intro,128
civil rights gains for communities of color coincide with the dictates of white self-interest. Little happens out of altruism alone.
As in the other essays discussed above, this essay by Bell is critical of racial desegregation. As the editors wrote,129
Bell insisted on placing race at the center of his intellectual inquiry rather than marginalizing it as a subclassification under the formal rubric of this or that legal doctrine.
Derrick A. Bell Jr.
Richard Delgado & Unconscious Racism
The last of the formative essays in the Intellectual Precursors: Early Criticism of Civil Rights Discourse section is by Richard Delgado (see the Appendix) titled The Impirical Scholar: Reflections on a Review of Civil Rights Literature.130 This had originally been published in 1984 in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 132. In this essay, Delgado complains131 of
exclusion of minority writing about key issues of race law, and that this exclusion does matter, the tradition causes blunting, skewings, and omissions in the literature dealing with race, racism, and American law.
Though he writes that his examination of the pertinent literature is132
admittedly not a scientific study
and though he never explains how or even if it was possible for those who select these articles for publication would be aware of the “race” of the authors in the first place, he nonetheless persists in his presumptions by asking133
What accounts for, what sustains this tradition? Can it be defended or justified?
In explaining the strange absence of minority scholarship from the text and footnotes of the central arenas of legal scholarship dealing with civil rights, I reject conscious malevolence or crass indifference. I think the explanation lies at the level of unconscious action and choice. It may be that the explanation lies in a need to remain in control, to make sure that legal change occurs, but not too fast.
In this essay, Delgado also argues in favor of affirmative action.135
SUMMARY of CRT’s FOUNDATION - CRT Opposes Race Neutrality & Civil Rights
The first 3 of these 4 Intellectual Precursor essays offered criticisms of civil rights legislation such as racial desegregation of schools. It seems charitable to sum up their arguments as thus: Because American society made the most obvious forms of racist injustice illegal, we rest on those laurels rather than diligently working against other forms of racism.
It seems fair to say that their positions on racial segregation and civil rights are ambiguous at times, but as we will see, when they do make their position clear, it is in favor of racial separatism, not in favor of racial integration.
Further questions are raised when we consider that Ibram X. Kendi, in How to be an Anti Racist136 argues137 that desegregation is “cultural racism”. Cultural racism, he writes, is the replacement for the biological racism of the Nazi holocaust. He writes that segregationists and assimilationists alike see white society as having “superior cultural standards” that black Americans either should be segregated from or allowed to assimilate into. If desegregation is racist, would that mean that racial segregation is anti-racist? One imagines Kendi would argue that segregation is racist without seeing the inconsistency (or hypocrisy) of also saying that desegregation is racist. Also, it is understandable how one might wonder, then, if Kendi would rather there have never been racial desegregation.
The last of the Intellectual Precursor essays argues in favor of affirmative action and focuses on what the author calls ‘unconscious racism’. These intellectual precursors argue against color-blindness and for race-consciousness. These are considered intellectual precursors to CRT. Therefore, it is fair to say that criticism of and opposition to civil rights, opposition to color blindness, the idea of unconscious racism and arguments for race-consciousness are precursors to CRT.
CRT in the 1990s
Delgado and Stefancic write in Critical Race Theory - An Introduction,138
The decade of the nineties saw the beginning of a vigorous offensive from the political Right. Abetted by heavy funding from conservative foundations and position papers from right-wing think tanks, conservatives advanced a series of policy initiatives, including campaigns against bilingual education, affirmative action, employment and educational set-asides, and immigration. They also lobbied energetically against hate-speech regulation, welfare, and governmental measures designed to increase minorities’ political representation in Congress. Some of the backers of these conservative initiatives were former liberals disenchanted with the country’s departure from color-blind neutrality. Others were nativists concerned about immigration or national security hawks worried about the threat of terrorism.
Critical race theorists took part in all those controversies. They also addressed identity issues within critical race theory, intergroup coalitions, and the use of empirical methods in theorizing and confronting discrimination.
CRT TODAY
Spread of CRT
Class & Race in CRT
Spread of CRT
In their book from 2017, CRT - Intro, Delgado and Stefancic write139
Critical race theory is taught at many law schools and has spread to other disciplines and countries. Some judges incorporate its ideas into opinions, often without labelling them as such. Lawyers use critical race theory techniques to advocate on behalf of clients and to expose bias within the system.
Indeed, the psychology course I was enrolled in at the Oregon University in 2016 was supposed to be about how mental health practices are conducted in other cultures but the course contained a great deal that instead focused on the themes from critical race theory we went over above without using the term ‘critical race theory’. Again, the section above on racial microaggressions quoted heavily from the learning material for this course.
EDUCATION, CRITICAL RACE THEORY IN: Scholarly movement that applies critical race theory to issues in the field of education, including high-stakes testing, affirmative action, hierarchy in schools, tracking and school discipline, bilingual and multicultural education, and the debate over ethnic studies and Western canon.
Although CRT began as a movement in the law, it has rapidly spread beyond that discipline. Today, many scholars in the field of education consider themselves critical race theorists who use CRT’s ideas to understand issues of school discipline and hierarchy, tracking, affirmative action, high-stakes testing, controversies over curriculum and history, bilingual and multicultural education, and alternative charter schools. (See, e.g., Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education [Edward Taylor, David Gillborn & Gloria Ladson-Billings eds., 2d ed. 2015].) They discuss the rise of biological racism in educational theory and practice and urge attention tot he resegregation of American Schools. Some question the Anglocentric curriculum and charge that many educators apply a “deficit theory” approach to schooling for minority kids.
Political scientists ponder voting strategies coined by critical race theorists, while women’s studies professors teach about intersectionality - the predicament of women of color and others who sit at the intersection of two or more categories. Ethnic studies courses often include a unit on critical race theory, and American studies departments teach material on critical white studies developed by CRT writers. Sociologists, theologians, and health care specialists use critical theory and its ideas. Philosophers incorporate critical race ideas in analyzing issues such as viewpoint discrimination and whether Western philosophy is inherently white in its orientation, values, and method of reasoning.
Unlike some academic disciplines, critical race theory contains an activist dimension. It tries not only to understand our social situation but to change it, setting out not only to ascertain how society organizes itself along racial lines and hierarchies but to transform it for the better.
In some respects, the movement is thriving. Dynamic subdisciplines, such as the Latino-critical movement, queer-crit (LGBT) studies, and a fledgling group of Muslims with a critical orientaton challenge civil rights thinkers to reconsider the ways they conceptualize equality, civil rights, and national security. Critical race theory is taught at many law schools and has spread to other disciplines and countries. Some judges incorporate its ideas into opinions, often without labeling them as such. Lawyers use critical race theory techniques to advocate on behalf of clients and to expose bias within the system. In this chapter, we discuss some of the internal struggles that are playing out within the group and examine a few topics, such as class, poverty, the wealth and income gaps, crime, campus climate, affirmative action, immigration, and voting rights, that are much on the country’s front burner.
Critical race theory has yet to develop a comprehensive theory of class. A few scholars address issues such as housing segregation in terms of both race and class, showing that black poverty is different from almost any other kind.
a general theory of race and economics remains elusive, at least for now. Interest in the topic is rising, however, especially among the millennial generation of young adults.
Note that the replacement of class struggle with struggle between identity groups based on skin color, sex, sexual orientation and so on145 is a neo-marxist strategy146 that has been called cultural Marxism by critical theorists since the 1970s if not earlier.
In recent years, CRT has concerned itself with demanding laws against hate speech, rules against hate speech and the establishment of safe spaces on campuses,147 preserving affirmative action,148 opposing the merit system,149 globalization, immigration and capitalism,150 voting ‘rights’ and, for example, arguing that people should be allowed to vote without a photo ID,151 identity,152racial microaggresions153 and more.
America's fundamentally racist nature serves whites which is why America remains so racist. This involves the concepts of interest convergence which we will discuss later.
A concern with intersectionality (which holds that, for example, a gay black transgender immigrant woman experiences more layers of oppression than a gay white woman born domestically who experiences more layers than a hetero white man and so on), differential racialization which is defined it in the glossary on page 172 as the “process by which each racial and ethnic group comes to be viewed and treated differently by mainstream society” and with holding an antiessentialist stance which means that they reject the view that men are essentially different than women, that black people are essentially different than white people, that gay people are essentially different than heterosexual people and so on. Thus, in their view, there are no real black or white people, no one is purely a man or a woman, no one is gay or straight and so on.
They write furthermore about intersectionality (on page 58) that it “means the examination of race, sex, class, national origin, and sexual orientation and how their combination plays out in various settings.”
The voice-of-color thesis. This is the view that minorities are qualified to speak about race and racism because they have knowledge of racism that whites are “unlikely to know”. We have devoted a section to this below.
Critical Race theory challenges the ability of conventional legal strategies to deliver social and economic justice. Some of its basic tenets include:
the belief that racism is a "fundamental part of American society, not an aberration that can be readily be remedied by law;"
a belief that "culture constructs its own social reality in its own self-interest" (minorities are not part of the legal systems self-interest);
an understanding that "white elites will tolerate or encourage racial progress for minorities only if doing so also promotes white self-interest;"and
that because it is "skeptical of dominant legal theories supporting hierarchy, neutrality, objectivity, color blindness, meritocracy, ahistoricism, and single axis analysis," it draws from several different theoretical foundations such as liberalism, feminism, law and society, Marxism, postmodernism, pragmatism, and cultural nationalism.
Critical race theory has yet to develop a comprehensive theory of class. A few scholars address issues such as housing segregation in terms of both race and class, showing that black poverty is different from almost any other kind.
a general theory of race and economics remains elusive, at least for now. Interest in the topic is rising, however, especially among the millennial generation of young adults.
Note that the replacement of class struggle with struggle between identity groups based on skin color, sex, sexual orientation and so on156 is a neo-marxist strategy157 that has been called cultural Marxism by critical theorists since the 1970s if not earlier.
In recent years, CRT has concerned itself with demanding laws against hate speech, rules against hate speech and the establishment of safe spaces on campuses,158 preserving affirmative action,159 opposing the merit system,160 globalization, immigration and capitalism,161 voting ‘rights’ and, for example, arguing that people should be allowed to vote without a photo ID,162 identity,163racial microaggresions164 and more.
In a nutshell, critical race theory argues for race based affirmative action policies such as in college admissions and employment applications but they want those colleges and workplaces to be racially segregated just as they want racially segregated nations.
Also see the section on merit under What CRT Opposes below.
Black Nationalism, White Nationalism, etc.
CRT is for what some call ethnonationalism as in black nationalism, white nationalism and so on. InCritical Race Theory - an Introduction, authors Delgado and Stefancic define165assimilation as the
process of taking on social and cultural traits of the majority race in the nation in which one resides.
view that a minority group should give priority to its own affairs and interests first.
They mean white nationalism, black nationalism and so on. This is also known as ethnonationalism. They write that some critical race theorists are assimilationists while others are nationalists who167
are apt to describe themselves as a nation within a nation and to hold that the loyalty and identification of black people, for example, should lie with that community and only secondarily with the United States.
They write168 that critical race theorists who take the nationalist view which includes calling for all black schools, all Latino schools. They also write169 that
Latino nationalists also endorse preservation of the Spanish language and ties with Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean or other homelands. A few speak of restoring what is now the U. S. Southwest to something like it previous condition - the mythical land of Aztlan.
Both Latino and black nationalists take a dim view or passing - the effort to deracinate oneself and present oneself as white. Latino nationalists usually reject the term “Hispanic” because of its association with Spain, the nation that oppressed their ancestors in Mexico and Central and South America. Nationalists honor ethnic studies and history as vital disciplines and loo with skepticism on members of their groups who date, marry, or form close friendships with whites or seek employment in white-dominated workplaces or industries.
The authors go over some intermediary positions on this contention.170 In Race Consciousness, Gary Peller writes171
I contrast integrationism with black nationalism as it was articulated during the 1960s by Malcolm X and others. My purpose . . . is to depict integrationism and nationalism as starkly contrasting discourses of racial justice-in part to identify integrationism as a particular racial ideology, depending for its persuasiveness on certain background images of social life that are controversial rather than self-evident-and in part to present black nationalism in a systematic, theoretical frame, to counter the deep-seated image in dominant discourse that black nationalism embodied merely an emotional and angry reaction to oppression, rather than an alternative, coherent, and reasoned analysis of the meaning of racial domination. . . I argue . . . that the contemporary mainstream image of racial justice in terms of transcending race consciousness was embraced in part to resolve the particular "threat" that black nationalism represented in the late 1960s and early 1970s: In the background of today's dominant discourse about race are the traces of profound cultural anxiety rooted in the broad-ranging critique that militant nationalists lodged against the assumptions of everyday life in American institutions.
As I have suggested, there was no analytically necessary reason that would require the identification of the social reform of racial integration with cultural assimilation, individualist norms, or with the idea that race consciousness is evil. But racial integration, and its oppositional relation to black nationalism, have acquired this particular meaning within the last two decades. The ideology of integrationism - with its analytic components of prejudice, discrimination, and segregation - forms the framework for American mainstream thinking about race.
The rejection of black nationalism as reverse racism, with the corresponding idea that any race consciousness implies a form of domination and oppression, now forms part of the underlying structure of mainstream discourse about race in legal, political, and cultural spheres.
CRT aligns with white nationalists against racial integration. Gary Peller in Race Consciousness,174
The reappearance and refinement of race consciousness in many critical race theory works symbolizes the break with the dominant civil rights discourse. For example . . . Kimberle Crenshaw argues that everyday institutional practices embody "white norms" that are camouflaged by a stance of cultural neutrality presented as "perspectivelessness." [4] . . . And Richard Delgado more generally contends that race makes a substantial difference in how scholars approach legal topics; he emphasizes storytelling and narrative as elements of a distinctive voice employed by people of color. [6]
The commitment to a race-conscious perspective by many critical race theorists is dramatic because explicit race consciousness has been considered taboo for at least fifteen years within mainstream American politics and for far longer within the particular conventions of law and legal scholarship. Instead, race has been understood through a set of beliefs-what I call "integrationist" ideology . . .
Along with the suppression of white racism that was the widely celebrated aim of civil rights reform, the dominant conception of racial justice was framed to require that black nationalists be equated with white supremacists, and that race consciousness on the part of either whites or blacks be marginalized as beyond the good sense of enlightened American culture. . .
A call for racial segregation and black nationalism is necessarily a call for white separatism and white nationalism. It is interesting to note that we have here a white theorist arguing for white nationalism and white separatism. This means that the author is arguing for racial segregation.
Again, they want the tax payer to pay to send applicant to college over an other based on skin color and they want students to go to racially segregated schools in a racially segregated society.
This is not the most major of the tenets of CRT, but it is legal defense supported by CRT. See the section on black rage in the Culture War Encyclopedia for more.
Critical White Studies
Critical white studies is the study of the white race and white privilege175 wherein, according to CRT - Intro176
a new generation of scholars has put whiteness under the lens and examined the construction of the white race. If, as most contemporary thinkers believe, race is not objective or biologically significant but constructed by social sentiment and power struggle, how did the white race in America come to exist, that is, how did it come to define itself?
About critical white studies, they also write,
A version of white privilege sometimes appears in discussions of affirmative action. Many whites feel that these programs victimize them, that requalified white candidates will be required to sacrifice their positions to less qualified minorities. So, is affirmative action a case of “reverse discrimination” against whites? Part of the argument that it is rests on an implicit assumption of innocence on the part of the white person displaced by affirmative action. . .
. . . many critical race theorists and social scientists hold that racism is pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained. If we take this perspective, then no white member of society seems quite so innocent.
Cumulative voting refers to any voting structure where individuals can pool their votes together for certain candidates. . . This can allow minority voting classes to achieve some election success by pooling all of their votes into a single election or a couple elections. . . Some local governments use cumulative voting structures to elect council and board members such as education board members. Some scholars and politicians argue that cumulative voting should be used more throughout the United States as a way to increase minority representation.
Indeed, cumulative voting is supported in critical race theory. In Critical Race Theory - an Introduction, Delgado and Stefancic describe cumulative voting178 as
reform in which voters may cast as many votes as positions up for election and may concentrate them on one individual if they choose.
They mean to write that it is, “reform in which voters may cast as many votes as there are positions up for election, they may concentrate them on oneposition if they choose and cast more than one vote for the same candidate.” Delgado and Stefancic also write,179
Voting Rights
As mentioned, aggressive policing and incarceration create large numbers of civilians who are ex-cons and unable to vote. But in addition to “felon disenfranchisement,” communities of color suffer another kind simply by reason of their numerical minority status. In most elections, except for those of mayors of certain large cities, people of color will be in the minority. Even if they vote as a bloc, if whites vote that way as well, minorities are apt to be outvoted.
The Supreme Court has recently approved voting requirements that have a disproportionate effect on minority voting. Until the country’s demographic makeup shifts even more decisively, efforts must continue to counter minority underrepresentation. Cumulative voting, proposed by a leading critical race theorist, would circumvent some of these problems by allowing voters racing a slate of candidates, for example, to place all ten of their votes one one, so that if one of the candidates is, say, an African American whose record and positions are attractive to that community, that candidate should be able to win election. The same author has provided a number of suggestions aimed at ameliorating the predicament of the lone black or brown legislator who is constantly outvoted in the halls of power or is required to engage in exchanges of votes or favors to register an infrequent victory.
With recent cutbacks in the protection of minorities in voting (Shelby County v. Holder), all these matters take on increased urgency. Since 2013, southern officials no longer need to secure federal “preclearance” when they change voting rules. Many have seized on this opportunity to require photo identification, relocate registration offices to distant locals, and limit voting hours in ways that are likely to fall heavily on minority citizens wishing to vote.
They do not name the, “leading critical race theorist” who proposed cumulative voting but they seem to be referring to Lani Guinier and her essay Groups, Representation, and Race-Conscious Districting: A Case of the Emperor’s Clothesoriginally printed in the 1992-1993 issue of Texas Law Review. This was reprinted in Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement180 and the editors of that book wrote181 that in her essay,
Lani Guinier analyzes the biases of our present winner-take-all system for deciding political representation. Gaunier describes how the electoral influence of minority groups can be systematically curtailed - or broadened - within the norms of democratic theory. Drawing on her experience as a voting rights litigator for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, she argues for a form of cumulative voting as the norm for protecting minority rights in a democratcie decision-making structure.
The controversy over racial group representation offers us an opportunity to reexamine the political fairness of our district-based electoral system. I posit that a system is procedurally fair only to the extent that it gives each participant an equal opportunity to influence outcomes. I call this principle one-vote, one-value. This is a measure of procedural, not substantive, legitimacy. According to this principle, outcomes are relevant only to the extent that they achieve some objective, substantive notion of distributive justice.
This is a term that has been applied to a number of movements, often placed under the umbrella of Cultural Studies. Which seek to fight for the rights of oppressed groups, including Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Feminism, Postcolonial Studies, and Marxism. Markers of identity like race, gender, sexuality, and class are analyzed to fight against oppression and stereotyping. Although these theorists often build on a deconstructionist analysis of uneven binary oppositions, they tend to reject poststructuralism’s problematizing of agency and power since the goal of these theoretical schools is to empower the traditionally excluded, marginalized, exploited, and downtrodden.
One criticism of this general approach is that it can contribute to an agonist
ic understanding of the social sphere, where each group is forever in conflict with others on the political stage. Feminist theorist Judith Butler for example turns to the notion of “radical democracy” to call for a situation of “permanent political contest” (Butler 1993: 222) on behalf of exclusive groups. The logic of identity politics has also been questioned by Kimberle Crenshaw, who argues that the emphasis on particular identity markers has kept critics from thinking through how multiple identity markers are often at play in oppression. As she writes, “Although racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices” (1991: 1242). She therefore turns to the concept of intersectionality to think about the common intersection of multiple identity markers in a given individual (e.g., black woman, queer black man, etc.).
argues that “The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite - that is frequently conflates or ignores intergroup differences.”
More on this under intersectionality in the Culture War Encyclopedia. Felluga writes186 that Crenshaw first theorized intersectionality for Critical Race Theory and Black Feminism.
Identity
Non-Neutrality
Oppositional Scholarship
Race Consciousness
In critical theory and critical race theory, the term race consciousness refers to awareness of the role of skin color in society, the view that skin color is central to society as well as an activist response to these perceptions and concerns. In critical theory and CRT, to be race conscious is to hold the view that society should be racially segregated and, in fact, that there should be race based nations (ethnonationalism).
To be very brief, racial realism is the view that racial equality can not ever be achieved through laws against racial discrimination or that it can never be achieved by any means.
Not to be confused with race realism, racial realism is an aspect of critical race theory. It is not universally accepted among crits though the father figure of CRT, Derrick A. Bell Jr. was a racial realist and, according to Delgado and Stefancic, the realists were in the “large majority” in the early years of critical race theory. See the section Racial Realism - CRT's Challenge to the Principle of Racial Equality.
Critical race theory tends to argue in favor of reparations.187 Some argue not only for reparations paid to black Americans (who have never been slaves and who may not be related to slaves) by white Americans (who have not owned slaves and most o whom are not related to slave holders)188 but also reparations paid to black, Chicano and Puerto Rican Americans.189
In social and political matters, the term color blindness refers to neutrality with regard to skin color. We sometimes encounter the alternate term race neutral in critical race theory and elsewhere.
One of the first critical race theory proposals had to do with hate speech . . .
Later articles and books built on this idea. One writer suggested criminalization as an answer; others urged that colleges and universities adopt student conduct rules designed to deter hate speech on campus. . .
U.S. courts have treated campus hate-speech codes harshly, striking down at least four as violations of the First Amendment. Elsewhere, however, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld that country’s criminal-hate-speech provision, citing U.S. critical race theorists’ work, while many European and British Commonwealth countries have instituted controls similar to Canada’s.
On the premise that “legal realism” will soon reach First Amendment jurisprudence, sweeping aside mechanical rules and barriers (“no recovery for mere offense”) in favor of a broader, more policy-sensitive approach, critical race theorists have been tackling some of the most common policy objections to hate-speech regulation, including that more speech serves as a pressure valve relieving tension that might explode in an even more harmful manner later, and that a focus on speech fails to get at the “real problem.” In the meantime, American courts, seemingly influenced by critical race theory writing, have been upholding causes of action brought by minority victims of hate speech under such legal theories as hostile environment.
As this book went to press, students on several dozen campuses were demonstrating for “safe spaces” and protection from racially hostile climates with daily insults, epithets, slurs, and displays of Confederate symbols and flags. Some campuses are reevaluating the possibility of rules and policies aimed at protecting equal educational opportunity. These “campus climate” issues are prompting serious reconsideration among university administrators, and for good reason. With affirmative action under sharp attack, universities need to assure that their campuses are as welcoming as possible. At the same time, a new generation of millennials seems to be demonstrating a renewed willingness to confront illegitimate authority.
Hate speech on the Internet is posing a difficult problem. Blog, tweets, cartoons (for example, of a disliked figure, such as the Prophet Muhammad), and other messages in this medium are inexpensive and easy to circulate, often anonymously. They enable those who dislike a person or race to find others of like mind, so that reinforcement builds, often unopposed. Society polarizes, with groups distrusting each other and believing the other side is wrong-headed. Of course, counterspeech is easy and inexpensive on the Internet. Still, the ready availability of an avenue for replying to a vituperative message has not completely solved the problem.
“We are beginning to flip stock arguments. Until now, the following argument has been determinative: the First Amendment condemns that; therefore it is wrong. We are raising the possibility that the correct argument may sometimes be: the First Amendment condemns that, therefore the First Amendment (or the way we understand it) is wrong. Although it is often said that free speech is the best protector of equality, perhaps equality is a precondition of effective speech, at least in the grand, dialogic sense. We can now take statements such as "The campus ought to be a bastion of free speech," and render them as "The campus ought to be a bastion of equal, respectful treatment." Or, finally, from the old saw "The cure is more speech." why not, "the cure is more equality."" - Richard Delgado, Harvard Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Law Review
Consider that Delgado may define such things as equality differently than others. Most people mean equality of opportunity and equal treatment under the law when they use the term equality. Others mean equal outcomes despite unequal efforts and unequal treatment under the law based on skin color to make up for past racial injustices.
”Racial insults are undeserving of first amendment protection because the perpetrator’s intention is not to discover truth or initiate dialogue but to injure the victim.” - Charles Lawrence, Duke Law Journal
[T]he law's failure to provide recourse to persons who are demeaned by the hate messages is in effect second injury to that person. The second injury is the pain of knowing that the government provides no remedy, and offers no recognition of the dehumanizing experience that the victims of hare propaganda are subjected to. The government's denial of personhood by denying legal recourse may be even more painful than the initial act of hatred. One can dismiss the hate group as an organization of marginal people, but the state is the official embodiment of the society we live in." - Mari Matsuda
critical race scholars are discontented with liberalism as a framework for addressing America’s racial problems. Many liberals believing in color blindness and neutral principles of constitutional law. They believe in equality, especially equal treatment for all persons, regardless of their different histories or current situations. Some even managed ro convince themselves that with the election of Barack Obama, we arrived at a postracial stage of social development.
In Racial Realism,192 the father figure of critical race theory derides193
liberal civil rights theory.
Merit
Crits tend to hold a critique of merit194 meaning that they oppose what is sometimes called the ‘merit system’. A merit system is one in which one gets what they earn. An applicant with a better education should get the position. A student with a higher SAT score should be chosen for admission into college.
The arguement in favor of affirmative action is an argument against merit. In CRT - Intro, Delgado & Stefancic define merit as,
Conventional worthiness - concept that critical race scholars call into question because they hold that it is unfair to rank people according to mechanical scales and distribute valuable social benefits on that basis.
These “mechanical scales” are in reference to, for example, SAT scores.
Race Neutrality
See the section on Color-Blindness under WHAT CRT OPPOSSES above.
Critical race theorists want to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. They say the decision resulted in “liberal integrationism” as they call it, [ 11 ] and “integrationist assumptions”.195 This should hardly surprise us by now, having seen that they are against racial assimilation. See the sections on Race Consciousness & Racial Separatism in CRT in the Culture War Encyclopedia.
Crits are suspicious of an other liberal mainstay, namely, rights. Particularly some of the older, more radical CRT scholars with roots in racial realism and an economic view of history believe that moral and legal rights are apt to do the right holder much less good than we like to think. In our system, rights are almost always procedural (for example, to a fair process) rather than substantive (for example, to food, housing, or education). Think how that system applauds affording everyone equality of opportunity but resist programs that assure equality of results, such as affirmative action at an elite college or university or efforts to equalize public school funding among districts in a region. Moreover, rights are almost always cut back when they conflict with the interests of the powerful. For example, hate speech, which largely targets mainly minorities, gays, lesbians, and other outsiders, receives legal protection, while speech that offends the interests of empowered groups finds a ready exception in First Amendment law. Thin, for example, of speech that insults a judge or other authority figure, that divulges a government secret, or that deceptively advertises products, thus cheating a large class of middle-income consumers. Think of speech that violates the copyright of a powerful publishing house or famous author.
Moreover, rights are said to be alienating. They separate people from each other - “stay away, I’ve got my rights” - rather than encourage them to form close, respectful communities.
When a group organizes for social change, it must have a clear concept of what it is fighting to achieve. Essentialism, then, entails a search for the proper unit, or atom, of social analysis and change.
They explain that in CRT, the view that there should be race neutral laws and principles is known as antiessentialism. They explain that in CRT, they avoid essentializing all non-whites together as a single oppressed group because this tends to come with costs for some smaller groups within that group. So then the question becomes; at what level should the essential be located? Should black gay women be essentialized along with all other black people? Should an Asian American woman be essentialized with women? Asian Americans? Asian American women?
CRT questions the tendency of some deconstructionist and postmodern CLS scholars to dismiss race altogether because, these CLS scholars argue, the very concept of race entails an overly essentialist view of subjectivity (e.g., biological, inherent, immutable); this is a CLS position that CRT scholars “have come to call ‘vulgar anti-essentialism’” (xxvi). As the editors of Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings explain,
“It was obvious to many of us that although race was … socially constructed (the idea of biological race is “false”), race was nonetheless “real” in the sense that there is a material dimension and weight to the experience of being “raced” in American society, a materiality that in significant ways has been produced and sustained by law. Thus, we understood our project as an effort to construct a race-conscious and at the same time anti-essentialist account of the process by which law participates in “race-ing” American society.” (Crenshaw et al. 1995: xxvi)
Critical Race Theory therefore adopts a rather complex approach to issues of race, as evidenced in key concepts that it shares with Black Feminist thought (see feminism), including the Matrix of Domination, intersectionality, and whiteness as property. For example, rather than see racism as an aberrant, now no longer common act that directly targets minorities by denying them their rights, CRT scholars examine what they term “micro-aggressions,” those common, quotidian, minor acts that serve to mark a racial minority as inferior (repetition of racial cliche’s, body language, even simply the avoidance of someone’s gaze). “White privilege” functions in much the same way: “reserving favors, smiles, kindness, the best stories, one’s most charming side, and invitations to real intimacy for one’s own kind of class” (Delgado and Stefancic 2001: 25). Racism, according to CRT, “is ordinary, not aberrational - ‘normal science,’ the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country” (7). A legal notion of equality that is “color blind,” purporting to provide the same opportunities to everyone regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation and so on, only addresses “the most blatant form of discrimination, such as mortgage redlining or the refusal to hire a black Ph.D. rather than a white high school dropout, that do stand out and attract our attention” (7).
Interest convergence is defined in CRT - Intro as a,203
Thesis pioneered by Derrick Bell that the majority group tolerates advances for racial justice only when it suits its interest to do so.
We will briefly explain who Derick Bell is in the history section below. Interest convergence is also known as material determinism so see that section below.
Intersectionality
In CRT - Intro, Delgado and Stefancic also write,204
Belief that individuals and classes often have shared or overlapping interests or traits.
This term is first theorized for Critical Race Theory and Black Feminism by Kimberle Crenshaw, who argues that “The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite - that is frequently conflates or ignores intergroup differences.” As she goes on to explain, “In the context of violence against women, this elision of difference in identity politics is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class” (1991: 1242). The problem is that “Feminist efforts to politicize experiences they each detail occur in mutually exclusive terrains” (1242). The result us a double disempowerment when one considers an intersectional identity like a woman of color: “The failure of feminism to interrogate race means that the resistance strategies of feminism will often replicate and reinforce the subordination of people of color, and the failure of antiracism to interrogate patriarchy means that antiracism will frequently reproduce the subordination of women” (1252). As Patricia Hill Collins puts it, “The sexual politics of Black womanhood reveals the fallacy of assuming that gender affects all women in the same way - race and class matter greatly” (2000: 229). Even within a single person’s life, intersecting markers of identity will affect that person differently at different times, as Collins explains:
“because oppression is constantly changing, different aspects of an individual U.S. Black woman’s self-definitions intermingle and become more salient: Her gender may be more prominent when she becomes a mother, her race when she searches for housing, her social class when she applies for credit, her sexual orientation when she applies for a job. In all of these contexts, her position in relation to and within intersecting oppressions shifts. (275)”
Rather than follow an either/or approach to question of identity intersectionality considers the multiple markers of identity (race, class, gender, sexuality) that can together exacerbate exclusion and oppression in our culture. Crenshaw’s and Colin’s particular concern tends to be issues that affect black women but interectionality can be and has been applied to other intersections of identity markers that could, otherwise, be theorized separately (e.g., queer black men), as Crenshaw suggests: “race can also be a coalition of straight and gay people of color, and thus serve as a basis for critique of churches and other cultural institutions that reproduce heterosexism” (1991: 1299). Collins makes this point as well: “Puerto Ricans, U.S. White men, Asian American gays and lesbians, U.S. White women and other historically identifiable groups all have distinctive histories that reflect their unique placement in intersecting oppressions” (2000: 227).
See also: Matrix of Domination.
Further reading: Collins 2000; Crenshaw 1991; Delgado and Stefancic 2001.
Material determinism is explained in the introduction to CRT - Intro as follows,206
Because racism advances the interests of both white elites (materially) and working class whites (psychically), large segments of society have little incentive to eradicate it . . .
Material determinism is also known as interest convergence.207
This is a term used in Critical Race Theory and Black Feminism to address the multiple structures that work to marginalize, oppress, or exploit identity groups. The concept seeks to address the structural mechanisms that contribute to the marginalization also of intersectional identities that bring together two or more identities, e.g., black women or queer black men. According to Patricia Hill Collins.
“Intersectional paradigms remind us that oppression cannot be reduced to one fundamental type, and that oppressions work together in producing injustice. In contrast, the Matrix of Domination refers to how these intersecting oppressions involve, structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal domains of power reappear across quite different forms of oppression. (2000: 18)”
Any Matrix of Domination will change over time, opening up the possibility of successful political action, and it will differ from nation to nation, even locality to locality. A Matrix of Domination also works differently at different levels of experience. As Collins explains,
“any particular matrix of domination is organized via four interrelated domains of power, namely the structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal domains. Each domain serves a particular purpose. The structural domain organizes oppression, whereas the disciplinary domain manages it. The hegemonic domain justifies oppression, and the interpersonal domain influences everyday lived experience and the individual consciousness that ensues. (276)”
To clarify, the structural domain of power “encompasses how social institutions are organized to reproduce Black women’s subordination over time” (272). In using the term, discipline, and also power: “As a way of ruling that relies on bureaucratic hierarchies and techniques of surveillance, the disciplinary domain manages power relations” (280). Whereas “The structural and disciplinary domains of power operate through systemwide social policies managed primarily by bureaucracies,” the hegemonic domain of power” and, so, “deals with ideology, culture, and consciousness” (284). Finally, the interpersonal domain of power addresses the everyday actions of individual people:
“Whereas the structural domain of power organizes the macro-level of social organization with the disciplinary domain managing its operations, the interpersonal domain functions through routinized, day-to-day practices of how people treat one another. . . . Such practices are systematic, recurrent, and so familiar that they often go unnoticed” (287).
See also: whiteness as property.
Microaggressions
One of the themes of critical race theory found in such books as Critical Race Theory - an Introduction by Delgado and Stefancic and Critical Race Theory - the Key Writings That Formed the Movement209 is that of racial microaggressions. This concept was explained quite methodically in a psychology elective I took at Oregon University in 2016 called Culture and Mental Health in a lessons called Microaggressions: Modern Racism Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts. There was too much to cover here (see the section on microaggressions in the Culture War Encyclopediafor more). We will, however look at some of the material regarding racial microggressions. Below is a slide displayed in class. It may be hard to read but we wil quote it all below.
We can see at the head,
Racial Microaggressions: Commonplace verbal or behavioral indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate hostile, derogatory or negative racial slight and insults.
We see that the 3 types of racial microaggressions are:
Microinsult (often unconscious) Behavioral/verbal remarks or comments that convey rudeness, insensitivity and demean a person’s racial heritage or identity.
Microassaut (often conscious) Explicit racial derogations characterized primarily by a violent verbal or nonverbal attack meant to hurt the intended victim through name calling, avoidant behavior or purposeful discriminatory actions.
Microinvalidation (often unconscious) Verbal comments or behaviors that exclude, negate, or nullify the psychological thoughts, feelings or experiential reality of a person of color.
We can see in that in this model, there are, on the macro-level,
Environmental Microaggressions
which are
Racial assaults, insults or invalidations which are manifested on systemic and environmental levels.
Under racial microinsults, we see the following examples,
Ascription of Intelligence - Assigning a degree of intelligence to a person of color based on their race.
Second Class Citizen - Treated as a lesser person or group.
Pathologizing values/communication styles - Notion that the values and communication styles of people of color are abnormal.
Assumption of Criminal Status - Presumed to be a criminal, dangerous, or deviant based on race.
Under microinvalidations, we see,
Alien in Own Land - Belief that visible racial/ethnic minority citizens are foreigners.
Color Blindness - Denial or pretense that a White person does not see color or race.
Myth of Meritocracy - Statements which assert that race plays a minor role in life success.
Denial of Individual Racism - Denial of personal racism or one’s role in it’s perpetuation
Revisionist history, Delgado and Stafancic write,210
reexamines America’s historical record, replacing comforting majoritarian interpretations of events with ones that square more accurately with minorities’ experiences.
Revisionist Interpretation
Revisionist interpretation is defined by Delgado and Stefancic211 as the
view of history or an event that challenges the accepted one.
Still others have been applying social -dominance theory and the work of Jim Sidanius and his colleagues in an effort to understand why humans seem to exhibit a drive to control and dominate their fellow citizens. And a few build on the work of Charles Pierce and Peggy Davis to theorize how microaggressions construct a world in which minorities and woman are constantly on the defensive. A handful of court opinions dealing with workplace discrimination find that a constant rain of small insults on the job amounts to redressable discrimination.
Structural Determinism
This term is defined in the glossary of CRT - Intro213 as the
Concept that a mode of thought or a widely shared practice determines significant social outcomes, usually without our conscious knowledge.
In other words, the structure of society determines, to some degree, people’s economic reality, social standing, career and so on. The implication is that the structure of American society determines that the average black family would have a lower standard of living that the average Asian family. They write.214
Structural determinism, a powerful notion that engages both the idealistic and the materialistic strands of critical race theory, takes a number of forms.
They emphasize the following 5 forms of structural determinism
POINT 1 - Tool of Thought and the dilemma of law reform215 - In their own way, in terms of legal research, they point out that tools for thought processes determine the thought processes to a large degree. If one wants to arrive at the opposite side of a grassy field, the tendency is to drive on whatever roads and take whatever turns are needed to arrive at the destination and not to drive across the field to arrive at the same point. The road system (which is a structure) tends to determine how you drive to your destination. New paths can be blazed but the tendency is to be limited by the structure. Thus, terms such as microaggressions and the various categories such as sexual orientation microinsults, racial microinvalidations and so on are needed to be able to accuse others of these various subtle slights.
POINT 2 - Empathetic fallacy - They define this216 as the
Mistaken belief that sweeping social reform can be accomplished through speech and incremental victories within the system.
They further explain that this form of structural determinism pertains to empathy, or rather a lack of it. As they write,217
Unfortunately, however, empathy is in shorter supply than we think. Most people in their daily lives do not come into contact with many persons of radically different race or social station. . . change comes slowly.
The idea that one can use words to undo the meanings that others attach to these very same words is to commit the empathetic fallacy - the belief that one can change a narrative by merely offering another, better one - that the reader’s or listener’s empathy will quickly and reliably take over. . . The idea that a better, fairer script can readily substitute for the older, prejudiced one is attractive but falsified by history. Change comes slowly.
POINT 3 - They proceed to imply that Americans tend to think of Mexican as wearing sombreros and serapes and claim that most Mexicans wear business suits. This book was published in 2017. No, not 1917. That was not a typing error. Yes, they actually claimed that Americans in this century tend to think that Mexicans dress like Speedy Gonzales and they claimed that most Mexicans wear business suits.
POINT 4 - Serving Two Masters - Some lawyers could be interested in doing what is advantageous for the civil right movement as a whole while they are supposed to be serving the specific needs of their individual clients in their particular cases. Hence, they have 2 different and often opposing interests to serve.219
POINT 5 - Race Remedies Law as a Homeostatic Device - A homeostatic device would be something that is devised to maintain stability. The authors write,220
Some crits, such as Derrick Bell and Alan Freeman, even argue that our system civil rights law and enforcement ensures that racial progress occurs at just the right slow pace. Too slow would make minorities impatient and risk destabilization; too fast could jeopardize important material and psychic benefits for elite groups. When the gap between our ideals and practices becomes too great, the system produces a “contradiction closing case,” so that everyone will think that it is truly fair and just. And on those rare when social conditions call for a genuine concession, such as affirmative action, the costs of that concession are always placed on minorities - in the form of stigma - or on working class whites,
The voice-of-color thesis, sometimes called the unique voice of color thesis, is the view that non-white people are uniquely qualified to speak about race and racism because they have personal experience and knowledge that whites are “unlikely to know”. In the glossary of Critical Race Theory - an Introduction by Delgado and Stafancic we find221
VOICE: Ability of a group, such as African Americans or women, to articulate experience in ways unique to it.
Coexisting in somewhat uneasy tension with antiessentialism, the voice-of-color thesis holds that because of their different histories and experiences with oppression, black, American Indian, Asian, and Latino writers and thinkers may be able to communicate matters that the whites are unlikely to know. Minority status, in other words, brings with it a presumed competence to speak about race and racism. The “legal storytelling” movement urges black and brown writers to recount their experiences with racism and the legal system and to apply their own unique perspectives to access law’s master narratives.
Antiessentialism argues that there is no such thing as a black person or a white person because these are social constructs not based in biological reality. Of course, this does not sit well with the argument that a given black person will have more and better knowledge of the experience of all black people than a given non-black person will have of all black people. Delgado and Stefancic write,223
Among the initial critiques, one by Randall Kennedy and another by Danial Farber and Suzanna Sherry are notable. Kennedy took issue with the idea that minority scholars speak in a unique “voice” about racial issues.
The editors of Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement included in their collection Two Life Stories: Reflections of One Black Woman Law Professor by Taunya Lovell Banks.224 In this essay, Banks writes that225
the absence of Black women from the legal landscape-especially as legal academics impoverishes the imagination of law students and other legal academics.
any attempt to justify the inclusion of Black women law professors based on some assertion of a special perspective of all Blacks, or all Black women, may be both difficult to make and politically risky-although ultimately right.
Also adds,
my struggle as an academic is to teach and write truthfully and accurately despite the feeling that I fit into no world.
Also,
Unfortunately, the nature of traditional legal dialogue within law schools and legal education devalues life experiences. Instead it favors the notion that bland, so-called "objectively reasoned" arguments, often devoid of any humanistic concern, are the only way to convey important legal ideas.
She offers two stories from her life in attempt to illustrate her point. Her first story involves a certain elevator ride she had with four other black women law professors. First one than an other white woman who had been waiting for the elevator decided to not get in with the 5 other people. She presumes that it was because of their skin color and does not consider that the elevator may have been too crowded for their liking. Five people, even if not overweight, may be too many people for an elevator for some people, such as people with claustrophobia or people with fear of elevators who may fear (however irrationally) that too much weight would make the elevator unsafe. She doesn’t once consider that there are people with such disabling fears and in doing so she marginalizes them while ignoring their existing. She also does not consider whether the white women were waiting to go up or down. This seems to be the most racist experience she can recall which, to many of us, suggests that she experienced little to no racism in her life. Hell, I witnessed more racism in kindergarten.
Her second story involves a mentally ill, apparently homeless man exposing himself to her on a train and how the authorities tried their best to handle the situation in accordance to her wishes. Somehow this is supposed to illustrate her point, whatever it is. If she had one, she did not make it clear. But she implied that the all white conductors would have handled it differently if she were not black. Unsurprisingly, she offers nothing to support her assumptions.
At any rate, the editors of Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement included her essay and state that it explores
the meaning of a distinctive voice in the context of pedagogy
Bank’s essay and her 2 stories are presented as representative of CRT’s voice of color thesis, basically that because she is black we should lend more weight to her arguments involving skin color but her two stories do more to illustrate that she rushes to racially stereotype situations thank reasonable people can immediately see may have nothing to do with skin color. Imagine this law professor trying to convince a judge that those white women or those white train conductors were racist with these stories. Would not the judge (if sensible) make a mental note that this law professor is full of shit? Her essay actually does more to discredit the voice of color thesis than to support it.
“White privilege” refers to the myriad of social advantages, benefits, and courtesies that come with being a member of the dominant race. Imagine a black man and a white man, equally qualified, interviewing for the same position in a business. The interviewer is white. The white candidate may feel more at ease with the interviewer because of the social connections he enjoys as a member of the same group. The interviewer may ask the white candidate to play golf later. Under the impression that few blacks golf, and not wishing to offend, he may not invite the black candidate to play. This example becomes especially telling when one considers that most corporate positions of power, despite token inroads, are still in the hands of whites.
According to a famous list compiled by Peggy McIntosh, white people enjoy and can rely on forty-six privileges that attach by reason of having white skin, including the assurance that store clerks will not follow them around, that people will not cross the street to avoid them at night, that their acheivements will not be regarded as exceptional or “credits to their race,” and that their occasional mistakes will not be attributed to biological inferiority. Scholars of white privilege write that white people benefit from a system of favors, exchanges, and courtesies from which outsiders of color are frequently excluded, including hiring one’s neighbor’s kids for summer jobs, a teacher’s agreement to give a favoured student an extra-credit assignment that will enable him or her to raise a grade of B+ to A-, or the kind of quiet networking that lands a borderline candidate a coveted position.
This has prompted one commentator to remark that our system of race is like a two-headed hydra. One head consists of outright racism - the oppression of some people on grounds of who they are. The other consists of white privilege - a system by which whites help and buoy each other up. If one lops off a single head, say, outright racism, but leaves the other intact, our systems of white over black/brown will remain virtually unchanged. The predicament of social reform, as one writer pointed out, is that “everything must change at once.” Otherwise, change is swallowed up by the remaining elements, so that we remain roughly as we were before. Culture replicates itself forever and ineluctably.
A version of white privilege sometimes appears in discussions of affirmative action. Many whites feel that these programs victimize them, that more qualified white candidates will be required to sacrifice their positions to less qualified minorities. So, is affirmative action a case of “reverse discrimination” against whites? Part of the argument that it is rests on an implicit assumption of innocense on the part of the white person displaced by affirmative action. The narrative behind this assumption characterizes whites as innocent, a powerful metaphor, and blacks as - what? Presumably, the opposite of innocent, namely, guilty. They are like thieves who enter where they do not belong and take things that others have worked hard for.
By contrast, many critical race theorists and social scientists hold that racism is pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained. If we take this perspective, then no white member of society seems quite so innocent. The interplay of meanings that one attaches to race; the stereotypes one holds of other people; the standards of looks, appearance, and beauty; and the need to guard one’s own position all powerfully determine one’s perspective. Indeed, one aspect of whiteness, according to some scholars, is its ability to seem perspectiveless or transparent. Whites do not see themselves as having a race but as being, simply, people. They do not believe that they think and reason from a white viewpoint but from a universally valid one - “the truth” - what everyone knows. By the same token, many whites will strenuously deny that they have benefited from white privilege, even in situations like the ones mentioned throughout this book (golf, summer jobs, extra-credit assignments, merchants who smile). (See marianne Bertrand & Sendhil Mullainathan, Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?, 94 Am. Econ.Rev. 991 [Sept. 2004].)
If someone claims that we cannot describe a machine, but we then proceed to detail how it works in minutiae- for example, its gears, switches, valves, we can study its operation, and see its actual operation in real time, then we can describe the machine whether or not we give it a proper name. The name is effectively irrelevant, standing only to describe the function and why the machine exists. It has a specific mode of operation and a specific outcome to the same. I thus deduce the actual function of wokeness based on what it seeks to oppose.
critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.
It would seem, then that the actual function of CRT is to oppose reason itself as well as equal liberty and blind justice for all. Warwick wrote of wokeness that it is
nothing more than an elaborate Marxist and arguably neofascist canard designed to weaken the fabric of civilization itself in order to usher in authoritarianism in every manner; legal, social, intellectual, and behavioral.
Justin Trouble, a content creator who has moved from Youtube (where he has 14 million views but is shadowbanned) to new tech (see here).
(more coming here soon)
CRT in SCHOOLS
Are They Teaching CRT in Schools?
Are They Just Teaching History?
Are They Teaching CRT in Schools?
(coming soon)
Are They Just Teaching History?
(coming soon)
CRT TOMORROW
In CRT - Intro, Delgado and Stefancic write that on perhaps a couple of decades or so, there will be a “power shift” from white people to other people and that this transition may not be peaceful because, they argue,231
the white establishment may resist an orderly progression toward sharing, particularly in connection with upper-level and technical jobs, police agencies, and government. As happened in South Africa, the change may be convulsive and cataclysmic. If so, critical theorists and activists will need to provide criminal defense for resistance movements and activists and to articulate theories and strategies for that resistance. . .
But, assuming that the transition proceeds and is relatively peaceable, civil rights activists and scholars will need to address a host of issues as the United States changes complexion. These include the continued deconstruction of race, so that biological theories of inferiority and hierarchy can never again arise. . .
Those efforts will include measures, such as economic boycotts, aimed at increasing minority representation in the media as well as countering publishers, writers, cartoonists, and more producers who continue to distribute demeaning caricatures of minorities. . .
Above all, they will need to marshal every conceivable arguments, exploit every chink, crack, and glimmer of interest convergence to make these reforms palatable to a majority that only at a few times in its history has seen fit to tolerate the; then they will need to assure, through appropriate legislation and other structural measures, that the reforms cannot easily be undone.
They go on to write232 that courts should be more inclined to be harsh with regard to hate speech. Also,233
The critique of color to accept race-consciousness measures in employment and education, levelling the playing field for those who have been excluded from society’s bounty.
They go on to imply that reparations should be paid to black Americans, Chicano Americans and Peurto Rican Americans;234
Critical race theory may even follow the example of critical legal studies (CLS), which embedded itself so thoroughly in academic scholarship and teaching that its precepts became commonplace, part of the conventional wisdom. This may, in fact, be happening. Consider how as well how many influential commentators, journalists, and books, such as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, develop critical themes while hardly mentioning their origins in critical thought. Might critical race theory one day diffuse into the atmosphere, like air, so that we are hardly aware of it anymore?
some aspects of critical race theory will be accepted by society’s manstream and halls of power, while other parts of it will continue to meet resistance. The narrative turn and storytelling scholarship seem well on their way toward acceptance, as does the critique of merit. The rise of social media has only accelerated these trends. Intersectionality seems well entrenched in women’s studies and other disciplines. More radical features, such as recognition that the status quo is inherently racist, rather than merely sporadically and accidentally so, seem less likely to gain acceptance. The need for regulation of hate crime and speech will probably become evident, as it has to dozens of European and Commonwealth nations.
Although sometimes included under the umbrella of Critical Race Theory, a few other movements have grown out of CRT, including Critical Race Feminism (CRF), Latino Critical Race Studies (LatCrit), Asian American Critical Race Studies (AsianCrit), and American Critical Race Studies (TribalCrit).
See also: contact zone and transculturation, mimicry, postcolonial studies.
The critical race theorists whose works have drawn from are arranged below alphabetically by with some information and links to establish that they are indeed critical race theorists.
The Harvard Law Bulletin, Winter 2012 states that Bell “joined the Harvard Law School faculty as a lecturer in 1969 and in 1971 became its first tenured black professor. He gave up his professorship in 1992 to protest the school’s hiring practices, specifically the lack of women of color on the faculty. His protest garnered national news coverage and stirred the passions of many students.
In 1980, Bell was appointed dean of the University of Oregon School of Law. He resigned in protest five years later after an Asian woman was denied tenure. He returned to Harvard to teach in 1986 and later led a five-day sit-in in his office to protest the school’s failure to grant tenure to two professors whose work involved critical race theory.
In 1990, Bell was appointed a full-time visiting professor at New York University School of Law on a permanent basis.”
John O. Calmore
(coming)
Anthony E. Cook
(coming)
Kimberlé Crenshaw
Kimberlé Crenshaw is one of the editors of the book Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement from which we served as one of our main sources. On the back cover of the book, it states that she is a professor of law at Columbia Law School in New York and UCLA.
According to Columbia Law School, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw’s areas of specialty include critical race theory, intersectionality, feminism and law. Columbia Law School also writes,
Kimberlé W. Crenshaw is a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, critical race theory, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism and the law. In addition to her position at Columbia Law School, she is a Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Crenshaw’s work has been foundational in critical race theory and in “intersectionality,” a term she coined to describe the double bind of simultaneous racial and gender prejudice. Her studies, writing, and activism have identified key issues in the perpetuation of inequality, including the “school to prison pipeline” for African American children and the criminalization of behavior among Black teenage girls. Through the Columbia Law School African American Policy Forum (AAPF), which she co-founded, Crenshaw co-authored (with Andrea Ritchie) Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women, which documented and drew attention to the killing of Black women and girls by police. Crenshaw and AAPF subsequently launched the #SayHerName campaign to call attention to police violence against Black women and girls.
Crenshaw is a sought-after speaker and conducts workshops and trainings. She is also the co-author of Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected. Her writing has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the National Black Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, and the Southern California Law Review. She is a founding coordinator of the Critical Race Theory workshop and co-editor of Critical Race Theory: Key Documents That Shaped the Movement. In 1981, she assisted on the legal team of Anita Hill during her testimony at the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Crenshaw writes regularly for The New Republic,The Nation, and Ms. and provides commentary for media outlets, including MSNBC and NPR, and hosts the podcast Intersectionality Matters! In addition to frequent speaking engagements, training sessions, and town halls, Crenshaw has facilitated workshops for human rights activists in Brazil and in India and for constitutional court judges in South Africa. She serves on the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academies of Science.
Crenshaw’s groundbreaking work on intersectionality was influential in the drafting of the equality clause in the South African Constitution. She authored the background paper on race and gender discrimination for the United Nations’ World Conference on Racism in 2001, served as the rapporteur for the conference’s expert group on gender and race discrimination, and coordinated NGO efforts to ensure the inclusion of gender in the WCAR Conference Declaration.
Harlon Dalton
(coming)
Richard Delgado
Richard Delgado rote Critical Race Theory - An Introduction with Jean Stefancic, one of the works we reference throughout our piece here. Delgado was among the earliest crits as CRT branched off from CLS. See above.
J.D., University of California, Berkeley (Boalt Hall) LL.M., Harvard University B.S., Stanford University
COURSES
Constitutional Law I and II
BIOGRAPHY
Professor Gotanda has litigated, taught, and published deeply on discrimination and civil rights; he is one of the nation’s foremost scholars on critical race theory.
Professor Gotanda has extensive experience in the classroom and in practice. He taught at California Western, City University of New York, and Duquesne University before coming to Western State in 1986. He has also worked with the Asian Law Caucus, California Rural Legal Assistance and the California Fair Employment Commission. His litigation experience includes trials and appeals involving employment discrimination, civil rights, and constitutional law. Professor Gotanda is presently active in the Society of American Law Teachers, the Association of American Studies, the Asian Pacific Americans and Religion Research Initiative, and the Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California. He was awarded the 1997 Clyde Ferguson Award by the Section on Minority Groups of the American Association of Law Schools.
PUBLICATIONS
Critical Race Theory: Key Writings That Formed The Movement, Ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, And Kendall Thomas, 1995, The New Press. Comparative Racialization: Racial Profiling And The Case Of Wen Ho Lee, 47 UCLA Law Review 1689 (2000).
Citizenship Nullification: The Impossibility Of Asian American Politics In Asian American In Politics: Perspectives, Experiences, Prospects, Ed. Gordon H. Chang, 2000, Woodrow Wilson Center Press, Stanford University Press.
Exclusion And Inclusion: Immigration And American Orientalism, In Across The Pacific: Asian Americans And Globalization, Ed. Evelyn Hu Dehart, 1999, Temple University Press.
Race, Citizenship And The Search For Political Community Among “We The People,” 76 Oregon Law Review 233 (1997).
Tales Of Two Judges: Judge Joyce Karlin And Judge Lance Ito, In The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, Ed. Wahneema Lubiano, 1997, Random House.
Chen The Chosen: Reflections On Unloving, 81 Iowa Law Review 1585 (1996).
Legal Implications Of Proposition 209 – The California Civil Rights Initiative, 24 Western State Univ. Law Review 1 (1996) (With Jamila Bayati, Susan Berkman, Cherisse Lanier, Heather McMillan, Sharon Tate And Janeen Carlberg Yoshida).
Failure Of The Color-Blind Vision: Race, Ethnicity, And The California Civil Rights Initiative, 23 Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 1135 (1996).
Multiculturalism And Racial Stratification, In Translating Cultures: The Future Of Multiculturalism, Ed. Avery Gordon And Chris Newfield, 1996, University Of Minnesota.
Towards Repeal Of Asian Exclusion, 1943-1950, In Asian Americans And Congress, Ed. Hyung-Chan Kim, 1996, Greenwood Press.
Re-Producing The Model Minority Stereotype: Judge Joyce Karlin’s Sentencing Colloquy In `People V. Soon Ja Du’, In Re-Visioning Asian American: Locating Diversity, Ed. Wendy L. Ng, Soo-Young Chin, James S. Moy, Gary Y. Okihiro, Washington State University, 1995.
Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory And Asian American Studies 21 Amerasia Journal 127 (1995).
The Assertion Of Asian-American Rights And The “Miss Saigon Syndrome,” In Asian Americans And The Supreme Court, Ed. Hyung-Chan Kim, 1992, Greenwood Press.
A Critique Of “Our Constitution Is Color-Blind,” 44 Stanford Law Review 1 (1991).
Book Review, 16 W. St. U. L. Rev. 327 (1988) Reviewing H. Schwartz, Packing The Courts.
Book Review, 15 W. St. U. L. Rev. 861 (1988) Reviewing D. Bell, And We Are Not Saved.
Book Review, 15 W. St. U. L. Rev. 373 (1987) Reviewing B. Wattenberg, The Birth Dearth.
Citizenship And Other Non-Whites: The Search For Community Among We The People, Accepted 1987, Black Law Journal, (Published In 1997).
Other Non-Whites In American Legal History: A Review Of “Justice At War,” 85 Columbia Law Review 1186 (1985).
Origins Of Racial Categorization In Colonial Virginia 1619-1705, (Unpublished Ll.M. Thesis) Harvard Law School (1980).
While Kendi does not refer to himself as a critical race theorist, his views align with other crits.
“This is 41. Sitting here reflecting on all the gifts I received over the last year. The gifts of life, of love, of learning. Gifts for me to struggle for joy and justice. Appreciating these gifts after finishing my latest lap around the sun. #BlackAugust#LeoSeason” (Tweet by Kendi, August 13, 2023)
“This is 41. Sitting here reflecting on all the gifts I received over the last year. The gifts of life, of love, of learning. Gifts for me to struggle for joy and justice. Appreciating these gifts after finishing my latest lap around the sun. #BlackAugust#LeoSeason” (Tweet by Kendi, August 13, 2023)
This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.
Ibram X. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University and the director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. Kendi is a contributing writer at the Atlantic and a CBS News correspondent. He is the author of The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965–1972 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), which won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize; Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (PublicAffairs, 2016), which won the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction; and the New York Times number-one best-seller, How to Be an Antiracist (One World, 2019).
During his fellowship year, Kendi is working on a historical monograph tentatively titled “Bones of Inequity: A Narrative History of Racist Policies in America.”
Kendi has published 14 academic essays in books and academic journals and op-eds in such periodicals as Black Perspectives, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Paris Review, Salon, Time, and the Washington Post. He has received research fellowships, grants, and visiting appointments from a variety of institutions, including the American Historical Association, Brown University, Duke University, the Library of Congress, the National Academy of Education, Princeton University, the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, and UCLA. In 2019, Kendi—who earned his PhD at Temple University—was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and honored as number 15 on The Root 100.
After graduating from law school, where he served on the Harvard Law Review and won the Sears Prize, Professor Peller clerked for the Honorable Morris Lasker of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. He was a member of the University of Virginia Law faculty from 1982-1988 prior to joining the Georgetown faculty. He has taught Constitutional Law, Contracts, Torts, Civil Rights, Bargain, Exchange & Liability, Criminal Procedure, Radical Legal Thought, and Jurisprudence at Georgetown. His writings are primarily in the field of legal theory and legal history. His most recent book is Critical Race Consciousness: Reconsidering American Ideologies of Racial Justice (Paradigm 2012).
Some 25 states have already enacted or are considering laws to ban teaching what they call “critical race theory” (“CRT”) in public schools, a concept that school officials around the country deny they even teach. A parents’ group in Washoe County, Nevada wants teachers to wear body cams, just to make sure. And Ted Cruz just charged that CRT is “every bit as racist as the klansmen in white sheets.”
As a law professor closely associated with the critical race theory movement for more than 30 years, I am astonished. Most academic work never gets noticed at all, and ours is being publicly vilified, even banned. While we wrote footnotes and taught our classes, did our ideas become the new orthodoxy in American society and the foundation of K-12 education, as our critics charge?
Hardly.
CRT is not a racialist ideology that declares all whites to be privileged oppressors, and CRT is not taught in public schools.
But over the past nine months or so, first slowly in right-wing media conversation and now quickly in state houses and even mainstream newspapers, conservative activists have branded all race reform efforts in education and employment as CRT—a disinformation campaign designed to rally disaffected middle- and working-class white people against progressive change.
If you understand what CRT actually is, though, it’s easy to see that it has nothing to do with the cartoonish picture of reverse racism that its critics depict. And, more importantly, CRT is a pretty good lens for understanding why the campaign against it has been able to spread so fast.
CRT, in the real world, describes the diverse work of a small group of scholars who write about the shortcomings of conventional civil rights approaches to understanding and transforming racial power in American society. It’s a complex critique that wouldn’t fit easily into a K-12 curriculum. Even law students find the ideas challenging; we ourselves struggle to put it in understandable terms. We embrace no simple or orthodox set of principles, so no one can really be “trained” in CRT. And if teachers were able to teach such analytically difficult ideas to public school students, it should be a cause for wild celebration, not denunciation.
The common starting point of our analysis is that racial power was not eliminated by the successes of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. That movement succeeded in ending the system of blatant segregation reflected in the “Whites Only” and “Colored” signs that once marked everyday life in America—but in its wake, in the 70s and the 80s, racial-justice reform in countless institutions was halted by old-guard resistance.
For example, as a first-year law teacher in the early 1980s, I served on the University of Virginia Law School admissions committee. UVA had been regularly admitting a tiny number of Black students for some 15 years by then. But some of my colleagues serving on the admissions committee were the very same people who had administered the school when it was segregated. The rules had changed, but they were still in charge. So, there they were, decades after formal desegregation, insisting categorically that all graduates of historically Black institutions were unprepared for the rigors of law study at such an elite school like Virginia, and voting against their admission.
The same story was playing out in institution after institution. The “Whites Only” signs were gone, but the racial power remained in a myriad of social practices—now couched in the language of race-neutrality, such as the old guard administrators’ professed concerns about “standards,” and their ideas about what those standards should be.
CRT was first articulated in the 1980s by a new generation of scholars who confronted this kind of racial power in the universities we attended and in the law schools where we would eventually teach. As American constitutional law embraced “colorblindness” as the ideal of racial justice, we focused on all the ways that racial power was exercised in supposedly “colorblind” ways. And while we have a number of different approaches and beliefs, our shared goal—broadly speaking—is to understand how those subtler racial power structures work, how they often pose as “neutral” institutions in law and society, and how to undo the injustices they’ve been causing.
From the viewpoint of traditional liberal thinking, the problem of “civil rights” was that the policy of racial integration was never implemented strongly enough. But, from a critical perspective, Black students getting admitted into mainstream institutions wasn’t enough to achieve racial equality—because once inside the gates, they confronted norms organizing what was taught and how it was taught that had been created exclusively by whites operating in all-white institutions. There were, or could be, racial power dynamics embedded even in what was called “knowledge” in academia or “neutrality” in law. Rather than seeing “racism” as an irrational deviation from rationality, we began to explore how liberal categories of reason and neutrality themselves might bear the marks of history and struggle, including racial and other forms of social power.
Critical race theorists analyze social practices—and the law is a social practice—in terms of how they help to construct or maintain the subordination of the Black community. We reject “colorblindness” as an ideal because being conscious about race is the only way to tell whether the situation of the Black community is improving or not. As appealing as colorblindness might sound to some, it’s also dangerous: It can lull decision-makers, wrongly, to assume that once they no longer explicitly discriminate along racial lines in admissions or hiring, then racial power no longer plays a part in social life.
U.S. and Comparative Constitutional Law Human Rights Legal Philosophy Feminist Legal Theory Critical Race Theory
SHOW LESS
Kendall Thomas is a scholar of comparative constitutional law and human rights whose teaching and research focus on critical race theory, legal philosophy, feminist legal theory, and law and sexuality.
Thomas is the co-founder and director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia Law School, where he leads interdisciplinary projects and programs that explore how the law operates as one of the central ways to create meaning in society. He is a founder of Amend the 13th, a movement to amend the U.S. Constitution to end enforced prison labor.
His seminal writing on the intersection of race and law appears in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Founded the Movement (1996), which he co-edited. He is also a co-editor of Legge Razza Diritti: La Critical Race Theory negli Stati Uniti (2005) and What's Left of Theory? (2000).
Thomas has taught at Columbia Law since 1986. He has been a visiting professor at Stanford Law School and a visiting professor in American studies and Afro-American studies at Princeton University. His writing has appeared in volumes of collected essays and in journals including National Black Law Journal, Widener Law Symposium Journal, and Columbia Journal of European Law.
Thomas was an inaugural recipient of the Berlin Prize Fellowship of the American Academy in Berlin and a member of the Special Committee of the American Center in Paris. He has been chair of the Jurisprudence Section and the Law and Humanities Section of the Association of American Law Schools.
He also has written and spoken widely on the impact of AIDS and was a founding member of the Majority Action Caucus of ACT UP, Sex Panic!, and the AIDS Prevention Action League. A former board member of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, he now serves on the board of the NYC AIDS Memorial.
Thomas is also a professional jazz vocalist who performs at venues including Joe’s Pub and is on the board of advisors of the Broadway Advocacy Coalition.
(multiple authors, edited by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendell Thomas, forward by Cornel West) - Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (copyright 1995) The New Press
(multiple authors, edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Caitlyn Roper, Ilena Silverman, Jake Silverstein) - The 1619 Project - A New Origin Story (copyright 2021 New York Times Company) One World
Pluckrose, Helen & James Lindsay - Cynical Theories - How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity - and Why This Harms Everybody - (copyright 2020, Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay) Pitchstone Publishing (1st edition, 2020)
This book is referred to as “an exhaustive effort” by the author of Debunking Critical Race Theory as well as Wokeness is Wrong - A Trend Debunked and many other books, Tarl Warwick (AKA as content creator Styxhexenhammer666) who graciously donated the forward.
It is suitable for general readers, students and professors. The reader is provided a fact-based, complete and comprehensive study of CRT without opinion from the author who presents pertinent information in a logically ordered and comprehensive manner. Every quote, claim and reference is supported by valid and sufficient evidence and/or is accompanied by a footnote which provides the original source down to the page number(s) and/or any pertinent information. The eBook version contains links for everything.
As we like to say at the Culture War Encyclopedia, Anyone can claim, we prove.
If you could have only one book on CRT, this would be the book to have because it digests all the major academic papers and books on CRT by critical (race) theorists including Critical Race Theory - an Introduction by Delgado and Stefancic and all of the important works in the CRT corpus including (but not limited to) all of those contained in Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement and gives you just the important parts. Less important but more popular works such as Ibram X. Kendi's How to be an Antiracist and The 1619 Project are also dissected. Almost all sources referenced are from critical theorists, critical race theorists and so on.
This book can stand alone or as part of the Culture War Encyclopedia.
See page 271, note 1 for chapter 1 in Cynical Theories - How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity - and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay (copyright 2020, Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay) Pitchstone Publishing (1st edition, 2020)
Kendi and “1619 Project” are dropped by federal Department of Education, but Silicon Valley, pharmaceutical donors ride to the rescue.
The Biden administration has cut language about “systemic racism” “anti-racist practices,” the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” and Ibram X. Kendi from its Priorities on American History and Civics Education, after a draft regulation provoked flood of negative comments, including a letter from 39 Republican senators.
Stoll concludes his article thusly,
In the absence of federal largesse, Kendi and Hannah-Jones have been successful in winning private funding for their projects. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, a private institution, announced a $10 million gift from Twitter and Square cofounder and CEO Jack Dorsey, and another $1.5 million from the Vertex Foundation. Howard University, a private historically Black institution in Washington, announced $20 million from three foundations—Knight, Ford, and MacArthur—and an anonymous donor to back Hannah-Jones in a new Center for Journalism and Democracy. It’d be an ironic twist if scholarship denouncing “racial capitalism” winds up attracting more steady support from fortunes made in insurance (MacArthur), automobiles (Ford), and high technology (Dorsey) than from a Democrat-controlled federal government.
Page 114 in Cynical Theories - How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity - and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay (copyright 2020, Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay) Pitchstone Publishing (1st edition, 2020)
On page i of Critical Theory - The Key Concepts (see bibliography) it states
Dino Franco Felluga is is Associate Professor of English at Purdue University. In addition to editing and authoring print books, he created the online Introduction Guide to Critical Theory and BRANCH. Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century (branchcollective.org)
He writes, “Critical Race Theory, as I see it, finds its finest expression when it, too, serves as “fuel for social transformation.” In that sense, our efforts must, while directed by critical theory, extend beyond critique and theory to lend support to the struggle to relieve the extraordinary suffering and racist oppression that is commonplace in the life experience of to many people of color.” on page 317 in Critical Race Theory Archie Shepp and Fire Music Securing An Authentic Intellectual Life in A Multicultural World by John O. Calmore as it appears in Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement
Page xiii in Critical Race Theory - the Key Writings That Formed the Movement, forward by Cornel West, edited by Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendel Thomas (the New Press, 1995)
See chapters 1 Postmodernism through 4 Queer Theory in Pluckrose, Helen & James Lindsay - Cynical Theories - How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity - and Why This Harms Everybody - (copyright 2020, Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay) Pitchstone Publishing (1st edition, 2020)
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Species (London: Routledge, 2002), 168. Although at other times, Foucault seems to have accepted that there can be more than one episteme in play in society, he consistently conceived of knowledge as the product of a powerful apparatus which determined what could be known.
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard and Jean Kafka (New York: Routledge, 2001); Michel Foucault, Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1975): Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972).
Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont distinguish hese two types of skepticism in Fashionable Nonsense:
Specific skepticism should not be cnfused with radical skepticism. It is important to distinguish carefuly between two different types of critiques of the sciences: those that are opposed to a particular theory and are based on specific arguements, amd those that repeat in one form or another the traditional arguments of radical skepticism. The former critiques can be interesting but can also be refused, while the latter are irrefutable but uninteresting (because of their universiality). . . . If one wants to contribute to science, be itnatural or social, one moust abandon radical doubts concerning the viability of logic or the possibility of knowing the world through observation and/or experiment. Of course, one can always have doubts about a specific theory. But general skeptical arguments put forward to support those doubts are irrelevant, precisely because of their generality.
Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals Abuse of Science (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 189.
Dino Franco Felluga is a professor at the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University. His specialties include critical theory. See here. As I write this in 2023, he has a 3.4 out of 5 rating on Rate My Professor.
Page 2, Critical Race Theory - the Key Writings That Formed the Movement, forward by Cornel West, edited by Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendel Thomas (the New Press, 1995)
Page 5, Critical Race Theory - the Key Writings That Formed the Movement, forward by Cornel West, edited by Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendel Thomas (the New Press, 1995)
Page 6, Critical Race Theory - the Key Writings That Formed the Movement, forward by Cornel West, edited by Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendel Thomas (the New Press, 1995)
Page 2, Critical Race Theory - the Key Writings That Formed the Movement, forward by Cornel West, edited by Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendel Thomas (the New Press, 1995)
Trent Schroyer in Critique of Domination: The Origins and Development of Critical Theory (copyright Trent Schroyer, 1973, published by George Braziller, New York), especially chapter 6: Cultural-Marxism: The Contradictions of Industrial “Rationality” (pages 199-223). Also, pages 225-228 and page 238.
Trent Schroyer in Critique of Domination: The Origins and Development of Critical Theory (copyright Trent Schroyer, 1973, published by George Braziller, New York), especially chapter 6: Cultural-Marxism: The Contradictions of Industrial “Rationality” (pages 199-223). Also, pages 225-228 and page 238
(multiple authors, forward by Cornel West, edited by Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendell Thomas) - Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (copyright 1995, the New Press) s (copyright 1995, the New Press)
Bell Jr., Derrick A. - Racial Realism - Connecticut Law Review Vol. 24, No. 2 (Winter, 1992); reprinted in Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (copyright 1995, the New Press)
Page xiii Critical Race Theory - the Key Writings That Formed the Movement, forward by Cornel West, edited by Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendel Thomas (the New Press, 1995)
Lawrence, III, Charles R. - The Word and the River: Pedagogy as Scholarship as Struggle, originally published in Southern California Law Review 65 / 2231 (July, 1992); reprinted in Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, pages 336-351
What Warwick wrote about wokeness applies to CRT as well. What does CRT oppose? Again, Delgado and Stefancic write on page 3 of Critical Race Theory - an Introduction,
