What is “critical race theory”?

Critical race theory is a theoretical framework that analyses the societal structures in relation to the framing of race, and its relations to law and power. The development of critical race theory or CRT for short, began within American law schools in the 1980s as a way to rework the analysis presented by the critical legal studies movement to focus on race – CLS itself posits that laws are not created as a means to pursue notions of fairness, justice and equality, but to maintain the status quo of existing power structures within a society. People associated with CRT include Derrick Bell, Robert Delgado, Patricia Williams, Mari Matsuda, and Kimberle Crenshaw. Crenshaw, in particular is notable for the application of her work to contribute to what would be termed ‘intersectionality’.

In America, the work of CRT scholars draws from the legacy of race – everything from slavery, anti-immigration acts, the Civil Rights Movement, and recent events; including the social and cultural expressions (such as literature, film, law, etc). From this analysis, the picture presented of America is of a nation built and embedded in racism and white supremacy. The aim of CRT is therefore to uncover the beliefs and practices that perpetuate this racism, while confronting and challenging them in order to dismantle systemic racism.

Consiistent themes within CRT include:

• A critique of liberalism and incrementalist solutions to social inequality e.g. rights-based remedies, affirmative action, color blindness, the merit principle, etc; in favour of political organising.
• Emphasis on the narratives of the lived realities of race, commonly referred to as “storytelling”.
• Revisionist interpretations of Amercan law with respect of civil rights; a critique on the motivations of the advances of these legislative changes. Derrick Bell, one of the founders of CRT, charged that civil rights legislation was as much in the interest of white elites as the racial minorities that were to benefit from it; and in the context of the Cold War, an improved image of America to the newly independent “post-colonial” nations would make helped build alliances with them.
• Social constructionism and anti-essentialism (as applied to race). CRT rejects race as a biological concept or as immutable in any form, and recognises it as contingent on social relations.
• Structural determinism, or “the structure of the legal thought informs its content”. In other words, when existing set of cultural norms leads to significant social outcomes. This suggests that the system as it exists today cannot effectively address certain problems.
• White privilege. As America was built on whiteness, its legal, social and culural norms will provide benefits towards white Americans and other white people compatible with them.
• Microaggressions. The everyday experiences of nonwhites, in which negative experiences which constantly reaffirm their oppression. ‘Small’ acts of racism done consciously or unconsciously.
• Internalized racism. If white supremacy constitutes the ruling ideas and cultural norms of American society, then for nonwhite individuals – acceptance of their inferiority to white people does occur.

CRT influences draw from the writings of Sojourner Truth, W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., as much as the social movements of the 1960s New Left, feminism, and post-structuralism. The work of CRT had a primary focus on the black-white paradigm of American life, subfields were developed to interpret life in the context of other ethnicities, and marginalized peoples in America, such as critical race feminism (CRF), Latino critical race studies (LatCrit), Asian American critical race studies (AsianCrit), American Indian critical race studies (TribalCrit), and so on. CRT has even been applied to the study of white immigrant groups.

While much of the focus on critical race theory (and therefore this post) is on the structure of the culture and society of the United States, CRT has had its methodology applied here in the United Kingdom to study its race relations (BritCrit), and also in Australia as Aboriginal Australian race studies.

Criticism and controversies

“critical race theory is the greatest threat to western civilization and it’s made its way into the US federal government, the military, and the justice system.”

Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States

Critical race theory has been criticised for its disawoval of several of the tenets found in classical liberalism, and its foundational framework drawing from social constructionism and postmodernism. From the right-wing, it is critiqued as a “greivance ideology” which implies that racism denies even the possibility of objectivity applied for ethnic minorities.

Richard Posner argues that critical race theorists eschew rational enquiry in favour of telling stories “…fictional, science-fictional, quasi-fictional, autobiographical, anecdotal – designed to expose the pervasive and debilitating racism of America today…”. However, Posner also argued that opposition to gay marriage can be made “rationally”, so perhaps that’s one point for social constructionism and critical legal studies in particular. Jeffrey Rosen and journalist George Will suggested that the legal defense of OJ Simpson during the 1994-95 murder trial saw the application of critical race theory in the form of storytelling and emphasis of American racism, particularly that of the LAPD to the acquittal of OJ – even with very strong evidence that the prosecution had that put into question his innocence.

The Trump administration charged that critical race theory and white privilege are “anti-American propaganda” that accuses the United States as inherently racist and sent a memo to the Office of Management and Budget demanding that expenditure not be directed to trainings on “critical race theory, white privilege, or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil”, and also deploying the Department of Education to issue a crackdown on “un-American propaganda sessions” about race. Since these are rather McCarthyite tactics deployed within the administration to CRT, this ironically ends up reinforcing the points made by CRT scholars, particularly ones critical of Donald Trump (read: all of them).

“As Walter Benn Michaels said, and as I have said time and time again, if anti-disparitarianism is your ideology, then for you a society qualifies as being just if 1 percent of the population controls 90 percent of the wealth, so long as that within that 1 percent 12 percent or so are black, etc., reflecting their share of the national population. This is the ideal of social justice for neoliberalism.”

Adolph Reed, Jr.

Critical race theory has also been criticized on the Left as well. Marxists generally have had, at best, a rocky relationship with CRT – some have argued that the primacy of race is the basis of its analytical framework rather than class relations. Marxists have taken exception of the notion of “whiteness as property”, and that all white people benefit from social privileges in a racist society, arguing that white working-class people generally have very limited social agency owing to their exploitation by the ruling class – as much as all working-class people; that asserting that the white working-class benefiting from their whiteness to be an absurdity, and unnecessarily dividing another set of exploited people whose shared interests are in class solidarity against capitalism. Marxists instead, use the concept of “racialisation” which explores how the construction of race is in relation to the mode of production, seeking analyse how groups are racialised in different capitalist and economic political processes. Some have gone further and suggested that CRT scholars really see the problem as not too many black faces at the top of the food chain, and use “whiteness” as a framework to reflect this, arguing it disavows class analysis over a politics of “diversity quotas”.

Responses

Critical race theorists have responded that several critics do not actually so much as engage and criticise the assertions that they make or its methodology, but to create a strawman of them and attack that instead. The critiques offered by Rosen and Will in relation to the O.J. Simpson case is not a critique of critical race theory on its own framework, but an excuse to brand it a problem based on a result that they didn’t agree with. None on O.J.’s defense team was a CRT scholar, nor is it in the interest of lawyers trained in CRT to represent wealthy black celebrities who can afford high-profile lawyers. As argued by feminist legal theorist Nancy Levitt:

“These rhetorical strategies are little more than polemical attacks and definitions by caricature,… These fallacies—emotivism, ad hominem arguments,and offering labels in lieu of reasons–diminish fundamental principles that have characterized historical rationality. What is blocked is not only the exploration of meaning, but also the road to inquiry.

Not only are they an intellectually weak method of critique, these extremist interpretations lead to fundamental misunderstanding of the philosophical issues in a movement. Race issues for the critics thus become unalterably etched in, please excuse the expression, black and white. Thoughtful points about the gendering of various situations or the conflation of sex and gender are dismissed by a refusal to actively engage the issues…”

As for for the Marxist and other leftist engagements with critical race theory, there are those who seek to incorporate the latter into their analytical framework, as the framework has had a consistent critique on the capitalist system and the production of the racial dynamics in society.

See also:

• Critical theory
• Critical legal studies
• “pomo left”
• Brahmin left
• “Cultural Marxism”
• White privilege
• Intersectionality