Critical Race Theory

RELATED TERMS: Afrofuturism; Afro-Pessimism; Black Studies; Intersectionality

Critical race theory, as a movement, is a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism and power. While traditional civil rights discourse stresses incrementalism and gradual progress, by contrast critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law (Delgado and Stefancic, 2017: 3).

Critical race theory had its first stirrings in the 1970s when a number of lawyers, activists and legal scholars across the USA realised, at roughly the same time, that the advances of the civil rights era of the 1960s had stalled. Worse, these advances were, in many respects, being rolled back. Early proponents, such as Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman and Richard Delgado, put their minds to the task of creating new theories and strategies, necessary to combat the subtler forms of racism that were gaining ground (Delgado and Stefancic, 2017: 4).

Derrick Bell, for example, spent the latter part of his career as an academic, during which time, he came to realise that the decisions in landmark civil-rights cases in the USA had had limited long-term practical effect. From this insight, he drew an unsettling conclusion: racism is so deeply ingrained in American society that it reasserts itself after each successive wave of reform aimed at eliminating it. He began to argue that racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of US society. These ideas were a major source of influence for the body of thought that came to be known in the 1980s as critical race theory (Cobb, 2021).

Critical race theory builds on the insights of two previous movements: critical legal studies and radical feminism (Delgado and Stefancic, 2017: 5). It also draws from certain European philosophers and theorists, such as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. In addition, it takes insights from the American radical tradition, for example, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as the Black Power and Chicano movements of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Among the basic tenets of critical race theory, not all of which are held by all practitioners, are the following:

• racism is ordinary; it is the normal way US society does business; and is the common, everyday experience of most people of colour in the USA;
• the US system of white-over-colour ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material, for the dominant group (sometimes called ‘interest convergence’ or material determinism);
• race and races are products of social thought and relations – not objective, inherent, or fixed, they correspond to no biological or genetic reality, they are categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient;
• the dominant society racialises different minority groups at different times, in response to shifting needs, such as the labor market;
• the notions of intersectionality and anti-essentialism, which holds that no person has a single, easily stated, unitary identity;
• the voice-of-colour thesis holds that minority status brings with it a presumed competence to speak about race and racism, a thesis that co-exists in an uneasy tension with anti-essentialism.

This last point, about the competence to speak, in other words, to be a reliable narrator of one’s own experience, raises the issue of power in relation to narrative. Thus, Delgado and Stefancic (2017: 11) note that, “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 assess law’s master narratives.” To this, the design of narrative environments would add that attention also needs to be paid to the ways in which people are ‘told’, both in the sense of being guided or instructed and in the sense of being narrated, by the ways in which their spatio-temporal environments are structured, that is, by the ways in which ‘master narratives’ are articulated environmentally.

References

Bell, D. (1992) Faces at the bottom of the well: the permanence of racism. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Childers, S. M. (2014) Promiscuous analysis in qualitative research, Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), pp. 819–826. doi: 10.1177/1077800414530266.

Cobb, J. (2021) The Man behind critical race theory, The New Yorker, (13 September). Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/20/the-man-behind-critical-race-theory? (Accessed: 8 August 2022).

Cole, M. (2009) Critical race theory and education: a Marxist response. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Crenshaw, K. et al. (eds) (1995) Critical race theory: the key writings that formed the movement. New York, NY: New Press.

Delgado, R. and Stefancic, J. (eds) (2017) Critical race theory: an introduction. 3rd edn. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Forlano, L. (2017) Posthumanism and design, She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation. Elsevier, 3(1), pp. 16–29. doi: 10.1016/j.sheji.2017.08.001.

Henry, K. L. and Powell, S. N. (2021) Kissing cousins: critical race theory’s racial realism and Afropessimism’s social death, in Grant, C. A., Woodson, A. N., and Dumas, M. J. (eds) The Future is black: Afro-pessimism, fugitivity and radical hope in education. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 79–85.

Ladson-Billings, G. and Tate, W. F. (1995) ‘Toward a critical race theory of education’, Teachers College Record, 97(1), pp. 47–68.

Tuhkanen, M. (2009) The American optic: psychoanalysis, critical race theory, and Richard Wright. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.