JWW ON CRITICAL RACE THEORY PART I

LET’S AT LEAST GET THE DEFINITION RIGHT

Like a raging wildfire, angst about critical race theory (CRT) has swept across the American political landscape in 2021.  Everybody’s

talking about something most just heard of recently. Nationally syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts, who contends he’s “forgotten more about race than most people have ever

known” noted he first heard of CRT in January.  He surveyed other African-American journalists who frequently write about race. Only one had heard of CRT before this year.

So, what’s going on?  Why the phobia among state legislators, school board members, U.S. Senators, and ordinary citizens?  WHAT IS CRT?  We’ve studied it, read books and articles about it, and discussed it with academics and other professionals interested in the subject. We also understand the cynical exploitation of an obscure academic concept for political gain. In this and our next post, we’ll unpack the definition of CRT and how it’s been misused.

 

The History Lesson

CRT didn’t magically appear from thin air. It originated in the mid-1980s. It’s a way

academics, most of them law professors, talk to each other about race and its interface with law and culture. It’s not the language of the streets or even the kitchen table. Right wing politicians and others with an agenda use it as if it were.

In the words of one of its founders, CRT is “a body of legal scholarship… [developed by theorists] ideologically committed to the struggle against racism, particularly as institutionalized in and by law.” Derrick Bell (1930 - 2011) offered that in a 1995 University of Illinois Law Review article titled “Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory?”  Professor Bell identified himself and four others (Richard Delgado, Charles Lawrence, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia Williams) as CRT’s “founding members.”

We believe it appropriate that we look to Professor Bell’s article and other works by those founding members in defining CRT. We’ve discovered that even we disagree about the proper interpretation of their definitions.  This post explores our differences.  We agree, however, about how the right has misused CRT in sparking fear and mistrust among Americans, most of them white, for political gain. We’ll explore that next time.

 

The Definitional Disagreement

University of Alabama law professor Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, who now teaches law at the University of Pittsburg,

collaborated in 2017 on Critical Race Theory: An Introduction,  3rd ed. They defined CRT as a movement by “a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.” This sounds like Professor Bell’s 1995 definition. Delgado and Stefanic added, however, that CRT “questions the very foundation of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

In discussing CRT, Rob and Henry, for slightly different reasons, have vigorously supported the idea the Delgado/Stefancic addition constitutes an indispensable element in CRT’s definition. Rob asserts that his review of Professor Bell’s work, particularly his books

And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice and Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism, provide graphic  examples of the kind of explorations of racially-tinged legal issues encompassed in the Delgado/Stefancic addition. Henry, relying on his judicial experience, sees their formulation as essential to any practical application of CRT in the legal process.

Woodson notes, however, that Professor Bell didn’t include the Delgado/Stefancic addition in that seminal Illinois Law Review article. Because of his prominence in developing CRT, Woodson thinks if he’d wanted to include that, he would  have. As importantly, Woodson seesopportunities for mischief in the Delgado/Stefancic addition. To the uninitiated, arguably vague terms like “Enlightenment rationalism” and “neutral principles of constitutional law” leave running room for misguided claims about CRT that have emerged in the current debate.

Right wing commentators like Fox News host Tucker Carlson have, for example, claimed

CRT represents a “poison” that could destroy American civilization. Mark Levin, an assertive proponent of laws that keep CRT out of classrooms, has argued it could “destroy the

existing society.” No basis exists for such ideas, but definitions matter. Good reasons abound for being careful about those that open the door for disinformation.

 

The Big Six

Beyond the definitional debate, we think CRT

offers useful ideas for exploring and understanding racism and its impact on legal norms.  We need creative ways of studying racial issues. No matter how the right twists itself into a pretzel in distorting CRT, its basic tenets remain useful for an important endeavor America still must undertake:

 

·    Racism is ordinary, not aberrational;

·    white over color serves important psychic and material purposes for the dominant group;

·    as a matter of social construction, race and races are products of social thought and relations;

·    how a dominant society racializes minority groups differs and depends on shifting needs, such as labor markets;

·    in terms of intersectionality and anti-essentialism, each race has its own origins and ever evolving history; and

·    the voice of color exists because it’s unlikely whites can convey the history and experiences of people of color.

                 

Hardly any elementary or secondary schools now teach CRT. No reason exists for fears about school children being indoctrinated to “hate America,” as some have claimed. Misuse of CRT, as columnist Pitts suggested, developed from those who “fear nothing quite so much as the loss of whiteness and its privileges.”

What if students explored America’s racial past guided, in part, by CRT’s six ideas? Would the world end if pupils studied slavery, Jim Crow, income inequality, and criminal justice inequity with these principles in mind? Of course not!

We  think it more likely all ethnic groups would come to grips with the negative effects of racism on American laws and norms, resulting in a more sensitive, just, and egalitarian society.