Critical Race Theory: A Primer
Author:
Bridges, Khiara M.
Edition:
1st
Copyright Date:
2019
31 chapters
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Chapter 2 The Conservatism of Liberal Discourse on Race 35 60 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Recognizing that institutional racism may help to constitute individual racism might lead to the insight that individual racism is not necessarily a personality trait that a person either has or does not have. Institutions and structures may individual racism and individual racists. And the converse is likely true: institutions and structures can dismantle individual racism and eliminate individual racists.
- an “objective” rule, or a “rational” regime exists. Neutrality, objectivity, and rationality are supposed to be outside of power. But, CRT proposes that power—white racial power, to be precise—created those concepts. CRT argues that white dominance formed the very condition of possibility for the idea that something could be apolitical. The concepts of neutrality, objectivity, and rationality, argues CRT, are “historical, contingent and rooted in the particularities of culture,” and they do not represent “the transcendence of perspective itself.”
- The result is that CRT tends to understand “neutrality”, “objectivity,” and “reason,” to be traps. They are excuses for maintaining the current maldistribution of racial power, deployed when the persistence of racial hierarchies needs to be defended. Now, CRT certainly understands their appeal. Crenshaw and Peller write that the concepts are seductive because they seem “to be able to do what [they] cannot do—resolve issues of social power, racial power, once and for all” without making the slightest mention of the dirty word of race and the uncomfortable truth that power has been (sometimes purposefully, sometimes unintentionally) distributed unevenly between racial groups. But, they cannot do what their proponents have promised they will do. CRT proposes that instead of placing our faith in these concepts, we ought to come to terms with the fact that racism is not a splotch on the body politic, but rather constitutive of it. It is not a blemish on society’s face, but rather...
- Liberals do not deny that racial stratification in the country persists. However, they do not attribute the persistence of racial inequality to the nation’s commitment to formal equality as its civil rights policy. On the whole, they believe that there is nothing wrong with the concept of formal equality. The problem that they see is in its implementation. They tend to believe that if conservative judges would not erect so many procedural barriers in front of plaintiffs seeking to vindicate their formal rights, or if the agencies charged with enforcing the civil rights laws would be funded properly or led by commissioners and chairs that are committed to civil rights, then formal equality will achieve what it is designed to achieve, and the nation’s existing racial hierarchies will be dismantled.
- While CRT certainly critiqued the impediments to substantive racial equality that it believed conservative judges and politicians had erected, it also critiqued the liberal understandings of race, racism, and racial justice that were embodied in civil rights laws—reformist and integration-oriented laws that liberals had fought for, championed, and continued to defend. CRT argued that conservatism was part and parcel of the way that liberals thought and talked about racism and racial equality, and they claimed that this conservatism explained why it was so easy for conservatives to coopt the language of civil rights to limit the scope of the civil rights laws. As Gary Peller describes it, conservatives had used “the very rhetoric of tolerance, color-blindness, and equal opportunity that once characterized progressive discourse to mark the limits of reform. But it would be a mistake to think that today’s conservative discourse is simply a bad faith distortion of a progressive...
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Chapter 15 The Intersection of Race and Disability 301 54 results (showing 5 best matches)
- This chapter explores scholarship that exists at the intersection of race and disability, beginning with a description of Disability Studies and an exposition of some of the insights that the field has generated, and then exploring the discipline’s turn to investigating race.
- It has only been in recent years that scholars who concentrate on race have paid any sustained attention to disability. The reverse is also true: only recently have scholars that specialize in disability paid any serious attention to race. The historical siloing of “race studies” and “disability studies” has prevented theorists from recognizing that the processes that racialize people and subordinate some can work in tandem with the processes that disable people and marginalize those so disabled. On this point, Jennifer James and Cynthia Wu observe that “the categories of race/ethnicity and disability are used to constitute one another” and that similar practices and discourses have kept racial minorities and persons with disabilities “in strikingly similar marginalized positions.” If James and Wu are right, then studies of race to investigate disability, as it is only through investigating disability that we will come to truly and completely understand race, racialization, and...
- Moreover, both Disability Studies and CRT conceptualize difference as relational. With respect to race, CRT has argued that whiteness has been constructed in opposition to nonwhiteness. For example, it says, the supposed dirtiness, laziness, and ugliness of black people have rendered white people clean, productive, and beautiful. The construction of indigenous people as savage, irrational, and backward has ensured that white people would be understood (and would understand themselves) as civilized, rational, and modern. The more that Asian and Latinx people could figure as irreducibly foreign, the more that white people could figure as inexorably “American.” Interestingly, Disability Studies has made a similar observation with respect to the “disabled” and the “non-disabled.” Ivan Watts and Nirmala Erevelles observe that “the monstrous body” “demarcate[s] the borders of the generic,” and the “pathological” “give[s] form to the normal.” ...rendered abominable and inadequate so...
- Disability Studies rejects this medical model and, instead, offers a “social model of disability.” This model proposes that while people may have impairments, it is society that people. This paradigm asserts that, we, as a society, have made choices about how we will build our physical environments, and we have established norms around behaviors that mark some behaviors as good and expected and others as bad and censurable. Thus, while an individual may have an impairment that prevents her from being able to use her legs to walk, we her when we build stairs instead of ramps that persons in wheelchairs can negotiate. And while an individual may have a mental impairment that renders her clinically depressed, we her when we do not make allowances for incapacity—when we expect everyone to go to work every day to earn a wage and to care for their children when they return home at night.
- Although the analogy between race and disability might be helpful when making arguments that persons with disabilities ought to enjoy legal protection from discrimination within law—if disability is like race, then discrimination of the basis of disability should be as illegal as discrimination on the basis of race—a number of scholars are wary of it. For one, those who propose the analogy oftentimes do not wish simply to make a comparison between persons with disabilities and people of color; rather, they wish to compare the persecutions that the two groups have endured in order to conclude that persons with disabilities “win” this Oppression Olympics. For example, two theorists of disability observe that “while literary and cultural studies have resurrected social identities such as gender, sexuality, class and race from . . . obscurity and neglect[,] disability ...of analyses of gender, sexuality, class and race has been matched by the rejection of analyses of disability—a...
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Chapter 10 White Privilege 195 72 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Thinkers have expanded this insight into the proposition that white people’s norms have come to constitute the norms of society, more generally. Thus, braids and dreadlocks—hairstyles that originated among black people and still are much more likely to be worn by this racial group—have been considered “unprofessional” and inappropriate for the workplace. ...that the characteristics that white people have considered important have become the standards against which all people are judged. For example, elites in the legal academy—who, historically speaking, were mostly, if not all, white—have thought that the mark of a good law professor is an extensive publication record; significantly less important to this group was the quality of the instruction a professor gives in a classroom. Because this group prized publishing while thinking less highly of teaching, all law professors are judged in terms of where and how often they have published; the question of whether they are... ...concept,...
- She argues that, at the dawn of the nation, the concept of property was deployed in a way that enabled white people to dominate nonwhite people: specifically, the institution of chattel slavery allowed black people to be transformed into a species of property that could be bought and sold, enabling white people to generate and accumulate vast quantities of wealth. Additionally, the lands that indigenous peoples inhabited were expropriated because courts embraced concepts of property that denied that indigenous people “owned” those lands; instead, the practices in which white people engaged were the only ones that were legally sufficient to establish ownership. In this way, Harris argues, notions of property were essential to the subordination of black and indigenous persons and the simultaneous establishment of white supremacy.
- Why do you think some conservatives believe that the concept of white privilege is a dangerous idea about race? Is it good or bad for some conservatives to find the concept dangerous?
- Do you believe that the concepts of effectively capture the idea that some white people are unprivileged along lines other than race and, consequently, face challenges? What other terms can you think of that capture this idea?
- As noted above, there are interlocking webs of privilege and unprivilege, such that an individual may be privileged along axes of race and class, but unprivileged along axes of gender and sexuality, for example. This undeniably complicates the experience, if not the concept, of white privilege. It may be difficult for a white middle-class lesbian, for example, to feel
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Chapter 14 The Intersection of Race and Religion 275 93 results (showing 5 best matches)
- If Meer and Naber are right, then the supposition that “Muslim” and “Jew” can be appropriately understood as racial designations does not represent a perversion of the concept of race. Instead, this supposition might simply represent a throwback—a reversion to early formulations of racial difference. One might even say that describing Muslims and Jews as races simply unearths and amplifies within the concept of race an element of religious otherness that, because present at the dawn of the idea of race, has always been embedded in the concept.
- Further, thinkers increasingly are observing that the conclusion that Muslims and Jews are races is not as great a departure from historical understandings of race as it may initially seem. These scholars have claimed that we misunderstand history when we believe that when the concept of race first arose, it entirely ignored religious distinctions and, instead, solely was organized around the idea of biological difference. This is the common understanding of the origins of the race concept: historians have proposed that the idea of race was born when Europeans first arrived on the African continent in the fifteenth century and European thinkers of the day sought to explain the differences in physical appearance (and, supposedly, temperament and personality) between the European explorers and the various African peoples they encountered. As the story goes, these thinkers were unconcerned that the diverse African peoples who lived on the continent practiced religions that were wholly...
- If these scholars are onto something, and if Islam and Judaism have been racialized, then “race” becomes a useful concept to use when theorizing, and politicizing, the experiences of Muslims and Jews. This chapter explores this possibility.
- If Balibar is on to something and culture can be racialized, how does this apply to Islam and its adherents? Scholars writing in this genre answer by noting that Islam oftentimes is represented as a religion that is composed of beliefs that are diametrically opposed to the values that the U.S. and other Western nations embrace. Edward Said laid the groundwork for this thinking in his canonical tome, He argued that since the first European forays into the lands that would come to be “the Orient,” the latter has been portrayed, thought of, and treated as the polar opposite of “the Occident”—that is, the West. He contends that the Orient has supplied the West with “one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Building on Said’s insight, Naber notes that Islam is commonly portrayed “as homogeneous, uncivilized, culturally backward, and violently misogynistic toward women.” ...has been “represented as a ‘menace’ to the west and to Christianity, it has more recently been... ...and...
- A racism which does not have the pseudo-biological concept of race as its main driving force has always existed . . . . Its prototype is anti-Semitism. Modern anti-Semitism—the form which began to crystallize in the Europe of the Enlightenment, if not indeed from the period in which the Spain of the Reconquista and the Inquisition gave a statist, nationalistic inflexion to theological anti-Judaism—is already a “culturalist” racism. Admittedly, bodily stigmata play a great role in its phantasmatics, but they do so more as signs of a deep psychology, as signs of a spiritual inheritance rather than a biological heredity.
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Chapter 13 The Intersection of Race and Sexuality 253 73 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Do you find this borrowing of racialized language problematic? Try to come up with a list of terms or concepts that can describe trans people’s lives and experiences that is less racialized. Do you believe that the terms on your list are as powerful—politically, emotionally, and/or intellectually—as racialized concepts such as “segregation” and “apartheid”? Why or why not?
- However, if intersectionality is understood more broadly—if it is disconnected from Crenshaw’s particular articulation of the concept and understood as generally referring to scholarship or politics that is interested in the myriad ways that multiple systems of oppression (e.g., racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity) impact differently-situated individuals differently—then it is wrong to say that intersectionality was at any time uninterested in matters of sexuality. Consider that the Combahee River Collective, a group of black feminists, issued a statement in 1977 in which they emphasized that thinking about matters of sexuality alongside matters of race and gender was paramount if social justice was ever to be achieved. They wrote:
- Some scholars have argued that it is strange, if not inappropriate, to apply the concept of intersectionality to matters of sexuality. Their argument is that intersectionality is the investigation of multidimensional, yet fixed, social identities, i.e., straight white men, Latinx lesbians, black bisexual men. Scholars with this view argue that sexuality is fluid and, as such, is not stable enough to be described in the categorical terms that intersectionality theory uses. That is, the “straight” white man may be straight in terms of sexual identity, “bisexual” in terms of sexual behavior, and “gay” in terms of sexual desires. The Latinx “lesbian” might be lesbian in the U.S., but not so in other sociopolitical settings. If sexuality ought not to be understood in terms of fixed categories—and if intersectionality requires conceptualizing phenomena in terms of fixed categories—then it might be misguided to approach sexuality through a lens of intersectionality. For a discussion of...
- But, as Darren Hutchinson has argued, an explicit interrogation of sexuality in intersectional studies actually improves intersectionality as a theory. In addition to making visible another system of oppression that impacts individuals’ lives—heteronormativity—it destabilizes concepts of privilege and subordination. He notes that intersectionality has assumed that women are unprivileged relative to men; consequently, it has assumed that all black women are unprivileged relative to black men. However, he argues that if we fold sexuality into the mix, it would call “into question the construction of men of color as privileged, relative to women of color.”
- Other critics of the analogy are disturbed by its invitation to compare subordinations—an exercise that they argue is rarely healthy and usually unproductive. As an example, Alycee Lane cites a champion for racial justice who rejected the analogy because he Lane argues that this Oppression Olympics—the perverse debate about which group’s suffering is the worst—is terribly divisive, working to prevent the creation of alliances between advocates for racial justice and advocates for gay rights. Lane asserts that an alliance to exist between these two groups because they both are struggling against the same enemy. He writes that black people (of all sexualities and gender identities) and LGBTQ persons (of all races) have been subordinated by a “
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Chapter 20 Education 437 114 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Led by Gloria Ladson-Billings, a contingent of progressive educators have brought the insights and critiques generated by legal scholars operating within the CRT framework to the field of education. Proceeding from the premise that our contemporary system of education is failing children of color, they have sought to analyze why that is and what can be done to fix it.
- Another alternative to the achievement gap is the concept of The concept pays attention to the histories of subordination that have made it difficult for communities of color to access education. For Ladson-Billings, these histories are important to acknowledge because they go a long way towards explaining the achievement gap in the present day. She identifies three types of debt that have contributed to black and Latinx underperformance. The first is economic debt, which refers to inequalities in school funding, as well as the factors that have caused people of color to have lower incomes and to possess less wealth than their white counterparts. The second is sociopolitical debt, which refers to the degree to which people of color have been unable to participate in the political process—the very same process that controls the educational system. The last is moral debt, which refers to what society owes to individuals and communities who “have been excluded from social benefits and...
- There is an academic achievement gap between white and nonwhite students. Data show that black and Latinx children do not perform at the same levels as their white and Asian peers. Hill notes that according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, up until the 1980s, there was a narrowing of the gap in the scores that black and white 17 year-olds earned on standardized tests that measured their reading ability. However, the gap stopped narrowing in the 1980s and has persisted with few changes since then. Moreover, while overall scores on the math and verbal portions of the SAT have risen over the past ten years, there is still a gap in scores earned by black and Latinx students and white and Asian students. “Even as the scores increased overall, the gap widened.”
- There are many theories that attempt to explain the academic achievement gap. However, the theory that CRT in education has critiqued most thoroughly and denounced most vehemently is the cultural deficit model. This theory contends that black and Latinx children do not perform as highly as their white and Asian counterparts because there is something wrong with their families and communities. The deficit model says that the dominant values in black and Latinx communities—like “present versus future time orientation, immediate instead of deferred gratification, an emphasis on cooperation rather than competition, and placing less value on education and upward mobility” —put the children from these communities at a distinct disadvantage in school. The model also proposes that unlike white and Asian families, black and Latinx parents do not prepare their children for school. Indeed, these parents are imagined not to value education very much. Instead, the parents of these children are...and
- 80% of Latino students and 74% of black students attend majority nonwhite schools (50–100% minority), and 43% of Latinos and 38% of blacks attend intensely segregated schools (those with only 0–10% of white students) across the nation. Fully 15% of black students, and 14% of Latino students, attend “apartheid schools” across the nation where whites make up 0 to 1% of the enrollment. . . . The nation’s largest metropolitan areas report severe school racial concentration. Half of the black students in Chicago metro, and one third of black students in New York, attend apartheid schools.
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Chapter 7 Structural/Institutional Racism 147 36 results (showing 5 best matches)
- In order to test the hypothesis, Unzueta and Lowery subjected a group of study participants to a self-affirmation manipulation. (The researchers asked participants to identify values that were central to their self-concept, and then they affirmed those values by asking the participants to explain why those values were important to them.) Another group of study participants were not exposed to the self-affirmation manipulation. Unzueta and Lowery found that the group whose self-concepts had been affirmed was more likely to identify race neutral processes that disproportionately burden nonwhite people as than the group whose self-concepts had not been affirmed.
- The concept became popular over the course of the next several decades, as it supplied an explanation for the persistence of racial inequality in the post-civil rights era—an era that did not feature pervasive acts of overt racism perpetrated by individuals. Although widely used, even those on the political left criticized the concept as not being fully fleshed out and, therefore, deficient in explanatory power. Indeed, early in the concept’s life, one social theorist “warned that the term ‘institutional racism’ would forever be a political slogan lacking in analytical rigour until it could be more precisely conceptualised, theorised, and subject to empirical investigation.”
- Now, there is a close relationship between the disparate impact standard and the concept of institutional/structural racism. Indeed, one would not be wrong to say that the disparate impact standard is designed to eliminate institutional/structural racism, as it is designed to bring the most rigorous judicial scrutiny to procedures and practices that, although race neutral, nevertheless have the effect of disparately impacting racial minorities, and negatively so.
- Although these four elements form the core of most definitions of institutional/structural racism, significant divergences in theorists’ understandings of the concept remain. One interesting variance concerns the question of whether institutional racism is a synonym for structural racism, or whether the terms refer to two different phenomena. While most theorists conceptualize the two as synonymous, some differentiate and , and thus differentiate and focuses on “intra-institutional dynamics,” referring to the “practices and procedures within an institution” that may have the unintended consequence of disadvantaging racial minorities as a group. He theorizes that the concept of Thus, within powell’s schema, a theorist concerned with identifying and dismantling will be looking within a single, isolated institution for those programs that act to reproduce racial hierarchies. Meanwhile, a theorist concerned with identifying and dismantling
- Perhaps the most disagreement pertaining to the concept of institutional/structural racism relates not to its definition or its contours, but rather to its existence. That is, many persons—especially those on the political right—are skeptical that there is such a thing called institutional or structural racism; if they recognize its existence, they are doubtful that it explains as many social outcomes as those on the political left believe. For example, in his dissent in constitutionality of race-based affirmative action, Justice Clarence Thomas expressed his disapproval of the concept of institutional/structural racism. Thomas theorized that the admissions plan at issue in the case “nearly guaranteed” black people with less than stellar LSAT scores admission to the University of Michigan Law School. ...for the LSAT. He suggested that maybe this was the real reason why black people, as a group, do not perform as well as white people on the LSAT and other standardized tests. He then...
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Chapter 8 Implicit Bias 157 85 results (showing 5 best matches)
- What should the existence of implicit biases mean for the law? A contingent of legal scholars called themselves behavioral realists have argued that the law ought to reflect the insights that social psychology has yielded about how humans actually process information and act in the real world.
- Thus, Krieger and Fiske argue that judges tasked with developing and construing antidiscrimination law should take into consideration the insights that social psychology has yielded and, using them as “a jurisprudential corrective,” rid the law of its erroneous “common sense” theories about how human cognitive processes work. They contend that jurists should construct a law that is mindful that not only do individuals tend to be unaware of their problematic associations and negative evaluations of historically marginalized groups, but also that these biases can pervert the decision making process by distorting perceptions of relevant information and influencing the ability of decision makers to retrieve this information from memory.
- CRT has never been a theory that is interested in “comforting narratives” and “bypassing potential sources of disagreement.” On the contrary, it has proudly proclaimed its desire to upset the status quo by telling unpleasant and unnerving truths about our racial past and present. It stands to reason that for some critical race theorists’ shying away from implicit bias research is due to the arguably nonconfrontational and, in some senses, conciliatory nature of the concept.
- Linda Krieger and Susan Fiske have offered a particularly compelling defense of behavioral realism in the context of antidiscrimination law. In an influential article, they respond to skeptics who caution against revising the law in light of discoveries about implicit biases. These skeptics have asserted that the law ought not to reflect new empirical research about human behavior—empirical research whose validity may be disproved in due course. Krieger and Fiske note that these disbelievers imagine that the options available to us are either to create a law that reflects the theory of human behavior suggested by implicit bias research, or to create a law that reflects no theory of human behavior at all. But, Krieger and Fiske argue that this misrepresents our choices. The observe that it is incorrect to believe that our antidiscrimination law in its current formulation is free of theory. Quite the opposite, they argue that antidiscrimination law currently reflects a theory of human...
- and critical thinkers about race have been open to the concept, finding it helpful for explaining existing racial stratification. Indeed, many progressive race scholars have devoted their scholarship to it. They have theorized the relationship between implicit racial biases and white dominance, documented the prevalence of implicit biases against racial minorities, and proposed reforms that might work to eliminate or reduce the impact of implicit racial biases. While this work around implicit bias has been well-received for the most part, some have been a bit more apprehensive about it. This chapter provides an overview of implicit bias research, describes proposals for its application in the law, and then discusses critiques that have been levied against it—both from those on the political right and political left.
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Chapter 17 Affirmative Action 343 94 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Harris’s point deserves elaboration. Here she alludes to an insight that critical thinkers have made regarding traditional definitions of merit: the things that we have come to identify as the stuff of merit are not at all neutral or objective. Instead, they reflect the subject positions, experiences, and values of those who are in power and have been able to define what merit is. For example, consider what merit with respect to law professor hiring looks like: a JD from an elite law school, membership on that law school’s law review, a Supreme Court clerkship, and articles that have been published in an elite law school’s law review. Critical thinkers underscore that the decision to privilege these specific achievements is not ...nothing “magical or intrinsically compelling” about these standards; they are “not the exclusive criteria for identifying candidates who [are] likely to make substantial contributions both to the educational mission of the school and to the broader goals...
- Powell also denied that a governmental interest in remedying the effects of past societal discrimination was a compelling one. He observed that the notion of past societal discrimination was an “amorphous concept of past injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past.” He was concerned that in attempting to remedy this nebulous harm, numerous white persons who had not engaged in any discriminatory behavior would be injured. In order to avoid harming this class, Powell interpreted the Constitution to forbid states from attempting to make whole another class: racial minorities who had been wrongfully excluded from the avenues to upward social and economic mobility.
- The original vision of affirmative action proceeded from the perspective of the subordinated. [When t]he students and community activists who fought for affirmative action in the 1960s and ’70s . . . demanded affirmative action—when they sat-in and sued and took over buildings and went on hunger strikes and closed down universities—they sought redress for their communities.”
- Perhaps a more compelling practical objection to the use of race in law is the observation noted above: there is an incredible amount of heterogeneity within one racial group. Indeed, a “racial group” may, in fact, be composed of various subgroups, and these subgroups may enjoy differing levels of social, political, and economic success. For example, in his dissent in , Justice Alito observed that the University of Texas’s affirmative action program evaluated “Asian Americans” according to traditional indicia of merit (i.e., standardized test scores, GPAs, extracurricular activities) while refusing to privilege such indicia when evaluating black and Latinx people. The idea, of course, is that because the latter groups do not perform as well as Asian American and white persons when appraised according to traditional indicia of merit, they ought to be assessed by alternative criteria. But, as Justice Alito points out, “Asian Americans” is a group that includes a range of different...
- Many progressives believe that this criticism is valid, and they take it to heart. Yet, they conclude that it does not counsel in favor of eliminating affirmative action programs entirely. Instead, they believe that it counsels in favor of crafting affirmative action programs. That is, the broad racial categories that are supposed to represent humanity’s racial divisions—white, black, Hispanic/Latinx, Native American, and Asian—may not be appropriate when the task involves identifying groups that have been advantaged and disadvantaged on account of race. Indeed, persons of Hmong, Cambodian, and Laotian descent have certainly experienced race-based disadvantage ...of “Asian” obscures the particularity of their racial experience. Thus, critical thinkers propose that a more granular analysis is required. They argue that institutions implementing race-based affirmative action programs should identify, with a great degree of specificity, groups that are socially, politically, and/...
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Chapter 3 Critiques of Critical Race Theory 57 79 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Johnson has also added nuance to the “voice of color” claim. He agrees with Delgado that the “voice of color” is a varied thing—born from the heterogeneous experiences that nonwhite people have had with racial disenfranchisement as inflected through their other axes of identity. (Johnson refers to the differences in the “voice of color” that are due to the multiplicity of nonwhite people’s experiences as “dialects.”) Moreover, he adds that one only hears a “voice of color” when a nonwhite person calls upon the insight that she has gained as a person of color. Thus, nonwhite people will not always and in every case speak in a “voice of color.” They will only speak in their voice of color when they use their lived experience as a racial minority as a source of insight. So, for example, a black scholar might analyze the tax code. However, that scholar only writes in her “voice of color” if she calls upon her experience as a person of color to yield some verity about that code. Thus,...
- Why is this important? Both critical race theory and empirical research on race are at crossroads. On one hand, critical race theory has been around now for a few decades and it has made important contributions. Of particular importance, it has provided a conceptual and theoretical basis from which to understand the extent to which race is not only socially but legally constructed, how racial subordination is not merely aberrational but a structured part of social relations, and how legal rules and doctrines—even those designed for antidiscrimination purposes—often produce outcomes that systemically disfavor racial minorities. While these insights are profound, the methods used to substantiate them have often not been as robust as they could be. Critical race theory has often focused on internal inconsistencies in legal doctrine or historical and theoretical critiques that, while important, often do not offer a measureable basis from which to understand the depth of these on-the-...and
- A productive revision to the monolithic voice of color argument—a revision that would be completely consistent with the CRT paradigm—might propose that, in a society built upon racial inequality and wherein racial stratification remains the order of the day, one can comfortably assume that any individual person of color has encountered racial disadvantage. This does not mean that race is destiny; it simply means that racial oppression, in some mode or manner, is unavoidable. When that individual allows the racial oppression that he has experienced, in whatever form that it has taken, to be a source of insight, he may have a perspective, a voice, that is different from the one possessed by a person who has not endured and survived racial disadvantage. This is the “voice of color” claim, redux.
- Elsewhere, Lawrence has written that it is important that people of color tell stories like the one with which he opens his “Id” article—and it is important that they tell them inside of law review articles and within law journals—simply because nonwhite people’s stories had not appeared in these spaces. “Our stories have, for the most part, not been told or recorded in the literature that is the law. Accordingly, the first reason for embracing narrative is that more of our stories must be told and heard.” Hearing stories that previously have been unheard might be valuable beyond the simple sense that it is good, in and of itself, to hear everyone’s tale. Instead, it might be valuable because stories are a source of information that, together with other sources of information, help us to gather a full, complex, detailed understanding of an issue. As Kathyrn Abrams states, there are myriad ways by which we can come to ...writes that each source of data “may supply insights that...
- Linking social science methods with critical race theory provides a remarkable opportunity to pursue race scholarship that is both theoretically sophisticated and empirically robust. That is to say, it is an opportunity to think about and measure race in new and exciting ways that builds upon the strengths of multiple disciplines to assess, document, and theoretically extrapolate the hidden ways in which not only law and society construct race, but the way that race constructs law and society.
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Chapter 6 The Legal Construction of Race 123 74 results (showing 5 best matches)
- It is stating the obvious, say social constructionists, that these genetic variations do not make genetic entities out of “Chicagoan” and “Angeleno.” Building on this insight, Jonathan Kahn notes, “Given that researchers may find differences in allele frequencies between Chicagoans and Los Angelinos, it is hardly surprising that they may find differences between groups somehow marked as ‘Black,’ ‘White,’ or ‘Asian.’ ” Considering that there likely are variations in the rates by which Chicagoans and Angelenos possess certain genes, why make “Black,” “White,” and “Asian” the stuff of biological race, but not make “Chicagoan” and “Angeleno” racial categories? The answer, argues Kahn and others, has nothing to do with biology or genetics, but everything to do with our socially constructed ideas about race.
- , lived are the sites where certain genes are “from.” If an individual’s ancestors hailed from those places, then there is an increased chance that the individual will possess the genes found in the population that once resided there. This is the concept of geographic ancestry. The declaration that race is a useful indicator of a person’s genetic composition—the modern form of the biological race concept—presupposes that race is a proxy for an individual’s geographic ancestry and, accordingly, indicates the populations from which an individual hails. It presupposes that black people are more likely to possess a gene because they are descendants of populations that resided in Africa; white people are more likely to possess a gene because they are descendants of populations that resided in Europe; and so on and so forth.
- Buried Alive: The Concept of Race in Science
- The concept of biological race has been the logic behind many social tragedies. The eugenics movement in the U.S. is a case in point. This movement was informed by the idea that characteristics such as “intelligence, ‘feeble-mindedness,’ criminality, alcoholism, [and] pauperism” were genetically determined. Eugenicists sought to prevent the dissemination of the genes that purportedly determined these traits and behaviors through efforts such as immigration restrictions, anti-miscegenation laws, and forced sterilizations. Moreover, nonwhite racial groups were on the receiving end of many eugenic policies, as the racial “scientists” of the day were confident that the genes that led to antisocial characteristics were disproportionately found in nonwhite races.
- The idea that race is a socially constructed entity, and not a biological one, began to gain wide acceptance in the 1940s, when the Holocaust demonstrated one of the most ghastly, but logical, consequences of the concept of biological race. By 1951, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
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Chapter 5 Other Crits 101 65 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Some might believe that analyzing the racial experiences of only those people of color who enjoy privileges of sexual orientation and gender identity is no oversight at all. The position would be that theorizing the lives of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and nonbinary persons of color would allow us to understand how and operate to privilege some lives while constraining others; however, theorizing these queer lives would not provide insight into how and
- It is worth emphasizing that it might be misguided to conceptualize CRF as a body of scholarship that is distinct from CRT. Crenshaw—who is one of several scholars who launched CRT as a scholarly movement—offered the concept of intersectionality for many reasons, one of which was to illuminate the sexism of antiracist movements that did not consider women of color and their experiences with racism. Crenshaw’s intervention worked to ensure that CRT would be an antiracist movement that did not repeat this error. In this way, intersectionality was not offered as a corrective to CRT; instead, it As a critical race theorist, Crenshaw’s introduction of the concept of intersectionality ensured that CRT’s antiracist efforts would be antisexist, as well. Thus, if CRF is an anthology of intersectional feminism—and if intersectional feminism CRT—then CRF is CRT. Thinking of CRF and CRT as separate might do an injustice to intersectionality’s location within CRT.
- While the historical and present interrelationship of race and disability will be explored more expansively in Chapter 15, we will simply note here the DisCrit observation that disabled persons of color are embodiments of intersectionality. Critical race theorist Kimberle Crenshaw offered the concept of intersectionality to refer to some individuals experiencing disadvantage on account of several axes of their identity. The case that Crenshaw used to introduce the concept was the black woman. She argued that black women are unprivileged by virtue of both their sex and their race. Thus, they are marginalized more than black men (who are unprivileged by virtue of race, but privileged by virtue of sex) and white women (who are unprivileged by virtue of sex, but privileged by virtue of race). Intersectionality means that, as women, black women have different experiences of racism than black men; and as black people, they have different experiences of sexism than white women. DisCrit...
- . For example, in taking no notice of indigenous persons, early CRT neglected to develop a critical understanding of colonialism. However, through its centering of indigenous subjects, TribalCrit has developed a rich comprehension of the practice. This deep knowledge of colonialist practices, and a cultivated awareness of the varied forms that colonialism has taken, may actually generate insights about black Americans’ experiences in the United States. That is, TribalCrit encourages us to ask questions like: how have black Americans been colonized? How has their colonization been different from indigenous peoples? How has it been similar?
- As mentioned above, Crenshaw offered the concept of intersectionality to describe how individuals are multiply disadvantaged (or multiply advantaged) on account of different axes of their identity. And while men are appropriately theorized within the intersectionality framework—that is, men have intersectional identities too, although one of their axes of identity (their sex) is a privileged one—it is also true that intersectionality has come to be identified as a theory that is “about” women of color. As such, CRF might be understood as an anthology of intersectional scholarship—a body of work that deploys Crenshaw’s theoretical intervention to analyze the lives of women of color in domestic and international contexts. As Wing describes it, “[E]xisting legal paradigms under US, foreign, and international law have permitted women of colour to fall between the cracks—becoming literally and figuratively voiceless and invisible. [CRF] attempts to not only identify and theorise about
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Chapter 1 The Origins of Critical Race Theory 21 50 results (showing 5 best matches)
- One can see, then, why CLS was attractive to the thinkers who would go on to found CRT. As Crenshaw and her coauthors explain, “While many in the legal community were, to put it mildly, deeply disturbed by the CLS assault against such ideological mainstays as the rule of the law, to scholars of color who drew on a history of colored communities’ struggle against formal and institutional racism, the crits’ contention that law was neither apolitical, neutral, nor determinate hardly seemed controversial.” These scholars of color understood these insights as foundational to “any serious attempt to understand the relationship between law and white supremacy.”
- “Rights” feels so new in the mouths of most black people. It is still so deliciously empowering to say. It is a sign for and a gift of selfhood that is very hard to contemplate reconstructing (deconstruction is too awful to think about!) at this point in history. It is the magic wand of visibility and invisibility, of inclusion and exclusion, of power and no-power. The concept of rights, both positive and negative, is the marker of our citizenship, our participatoriness, our relation to others.
- Second, although the crits proclaimed to be invested in exposing the indeterminacy, incoherence, and contradictory nature of law because of an overarching interest in freeing minds and producing social justice, at times, it appeared as though they were simply interested in critique for critique’s sake. The budding critical race theorists thought that critique for critique’s sake was a waste of time—a luxury that they simply could not afford. As Richard Delgado puts it, “Racism will not go away simply because Crits show that legalisms are indeterminate, that rights are alienating and legitimizing, and that law is a reflection of the interests of the ruling class. Whatever utility these concepts may have in other settings and in attempting to explain the angst of CLS members, they have limited application in helping to understand, much less cure, racism.”
- suggest a faith in certain concepts and institutions that postmodernists lack. . . . [M]odernist narratives have faith that once enough people see the truth, right action will follow: that enlightenment leads to empowerment, and that empowerment leads to emancipation. Modernist narratives, then, are profoundly hopeful. They assume that people of color and whites live in the same perceptual and moral world, that reason speaks to us all in the same way despite our different experiences, and that reason, rather than habit or power, is what will motivate people. Modernist narratives also can be profoundly romantic. They imagine heroic action by a formerly oppressed people rising up as one, “empowered” to be who they “really” are or choose to be, breathing the thin and bracing air of freedom.
- CLS’s skepticism about pursuing an intellectual project that centers race is similar to the skepticism that many people feel about identity politics. Indeed, when describing crits’ uncertainty about the CRT project, Crenshaw and her co-authors speak about it in terms of the crits’ disdain of the concept of identity. They write that these crits had adopted a “post-modern critique of identity” that led them to believe that “since racial categories are not ‘real’ or ‘natural’ but instead socially constructed, it is theoretically and politically absurd to center race as a category of analysis or a basis for political action.”
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Table of Contents 50 results (showing 5 best matches)
Index 473 130 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Insights about issues not specifically about Latinx subjects, 92–93
- Interest convergence and segregation, desegregation and resegregation, 446–448
- Overmatch and mismatch, 362–365
- Racial stereotypes, promotion and/or dependence on, 356–357
- University of Michigan and University of Michigan Law School, 350–353
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Chapter 4 The LatCrit Intervention 83 63 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Centering Latinx Subjects Reveals Insights About Issues That Are Not Specifically About Latinx Subjects
- LatCrit insists that the theory is not “just” about Latinx subjects. Indeed, it proposes that it can make productive contributions to matters that have universal import. Further, LatCrit proposes that it is the practice of centering Latinx subjects that generates these valuable insights about issues of general concern.
- Most modern progressive thinkers about race reject black exceptionalism. (And it is unlikely that many critical race theorists at CRT’s inception embraced the concept.) This is, in part, due to the fact that the two claims upon which black exceptionalism rests might be false—or, at least, they may not be entirely true.
- LatCrit challenges us to think about the desirability of importing Latinx conceptions of identity, and race, into the U.S. Hernández-Truyol observes that in Latin America, race is a shifting entity. “[T]he reality of racial admixtures developed the concept of ‘race’ as a fluid continuum, rather than the absolutist black/white paradigm. This fluid model, where the construction of race is imbued with values based upon class, education, economics, and culture, lacks rigid borders . . . and allows traveling in and out of categories.”
- ...is important because it makes the “Latinx subject” difficult to identify. For example, when one speaks about this subject as if she always speaks Spanish, it erases those Latinx people who speak only indigenous languages. When one imagines that the subject is always Catholic, it makes invisible those Latinx people who are Muslim or atheists. The “Latinx subject” cannot be a fixed, unitary, singular thing; instead, in order to accommodate the multiplicity that characterizes those who are Latinx, it must be a multiple, shifting, capacious concept. In this way, speaking about the “Latinx subject” in a way that does not erase any Latinx individual is a feat of antiessentialism; it is coup inasmuch as it avoids reducing a heterogeneous group to one of its many parts. Those who have been accused of essentializing its membership—i.e., when feminists speak about “women,” but only mean affluent cisgender white women; when advocates for racial justice speak about “black people,”...
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Chapter 16 Health 319 94 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Critical thinkers dispute cultural explanations of racial health disparities on multiple fronts. First, they deny that culture is as fixed, unalterable, static, and constraining as these explanations imagine them to be. They note that when culture is imagined to be as deterministic as it must be if it is to explain the poorer states of health that people of color inhabit, the concept of culture functions to condemn groups of persons as effectively as did the race concept of yesteryear. As anthropologist Kamala Visweswaran explains,
- As discussed in Chapter 6, the view that a race is a genetically homogenous group of persons has a long history. After the Holocaust—when Nazi Germany relied on ideas of biological race to justify the murder of millions of Jews—the concept of biological race began to fall out of favor. The idea was further discredited decades later, when the Human Genome Project’s mapping of the entire catalogue of human genes in 2003 revealed that all human beings, regardless of race, share 99.9 percent of the same genes.
- [B]ecause everyone ‘talks culture’ (that is to say, has access to the concept of culture), its relativist outlines have been increasingly filled by racist content. But does that not illustrate how culture has come to stand in for race? . . . [C]ulture is asked to do the work of race. This is perhaps what Walter Benn Michaels means by the title of his essay “Race as Culture.” He writes, “Our sense of culture is characteristically meant to displace race, but . . . culture has turned out to be a way of continuing rather than repudiating racial thought.”
- If the concept of biological race persists into the present, it is because of uncertainty around the significance of that 0.1 percent of genes that humans do not share. While most scientists believe that the residuum of genetic difference is not distributed among the racial groups that we recognize (i.e., black, white, Asian, etc.) in a way that makes it possible to think about race in genetic terms, many people disagree. For example, in 2012, a group of researchers at Boston University probed the “role of genetics” in black women’s experiences with cancer.
- And yet another example: Hypertension can lead to heart disease and stroke, the first and fourth leading causes of death in the U.S. The rate of hypertension is highest among black adults—at 41.3%; the rates for white people and Latinx people are 28.6% and 27.7%, respectively.
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Introduction 1 57 results (showing 5 best matches)
- In the last weeks of 2015, a married couple, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, walked into a holiday party at a conference center in San Bernardino, California and sprayed a crowd of unarmed people with bullets. Fourteen people were killed and 21 others were wounded. Although Farook worked for the San Bernardino County health department, which was hosting the party, many news outlets almost immediately began reporting that the shooting was a “terror attack” and not, say, a “workplace shooting.” However, other mass shootings have not been similarly understood as acts of terrorism: the attack at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs by a “warrior for the babies,” in which three persons lost their lives; the homicides of six people in Kalamazoo, Michigan by an Uber driver who picked up and dropped off passengers between shootings; the shooting deaths of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina by a self-proclaimed white supremacist whose stated intent was to spark a...
- CRT responds that class, gender, religion, and even an individual’s behavior are important in explaining social life. But, they insist that . CRT proposes that race intersects with class, with gender, with religion, with sexuality, and with other factors (including individual behavior) to produce a society that is racially stratified. Indeed, it insists that one cannot understand the inequalities within society if one fails to understand classism, sexism, religious intolerance, homophobia, transphobia, etc. The insight upon which CRT insists is that race, almost invariably, is a factor. Race intersects with other axes of identity and -isms to produce the world in which we exist. It claims that the occasions in which race is irrelevant are
- The balance of the book will be a presentation of Critical Race Theory. Its goal is to explain the theory’s basic commitments, examine its strengths, and identify its weaknesses. Part I will provide a history of CRT—exploring CRT’s emergence out of Professor Bell’s scholarship and student agitation at Harvard Law School, its critique of liberal and other leftist discourse about race, and interventions made by scholars who criticized CRT’s initial erasure of the racial experiences of nonblack racial minorities. Part II will introduce and explore several core concepts in the theory—including institutional/structural racism, implicit bias, microaggressions, racial privilege, the relationship between race and class, and intersectionality. Part III will build on Part II’s discussion of intersectionality by exploring the intersection of race with a variety of other characteristics—including, sexuality and gender identity, religion, and ability. Part IV will then explore several... ..., and...
- That Flint used lead pipes to pump water into and out of homes is not all unique. In fact, many older cities across the nation and around the globe use lead pipes. Thus, everyone living in these places—rich and poor, white and nonwhite—is endangered by an infrastructure that, under certain circumstances, can be harmful. Further, the latent potential for harm increases as these infrastructures age and crumble. However, some communities will be wealthy enough to repair or replace its infrastructure. Some communities will be able to afford to rip out the lead pipes and substitute them with safer alternatives. And some people will be able to move out of toxic neighborhoods and into newer, healthier ones. The communities unable to afford to manage the risks associated with their risky infrastructures, and the people left behind there, inevitably will be poor. In a country where race follows class closely, these people and communities will disproportionately be nonwhite.
- Black Americans have higher rates of diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and asthma than any other racial group. They also have higher rates of most cancers, and they are much less likely to survive prostate cancer, breast cancer, and lung cancer relative to white people. Latinx people have higher rates of diabetes than white people, and they are much more likely to die from the disease than are their white counterparts. The prevalence of obesity is highest among indigenous persons. They are also 60 percent more likely than their white counterparts to suffer a stroke; indeed, the rate of stroke among indigenous women is twice that of white women.
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Chapter 12 Intersectionality 233 66 results (showing 5 best matches)
- In her subsequent article, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Crenshaw provided additional contour to the concept of intersectionality. She reiterated the claim that the agendas of feminist and antiracist organizations frequently overlook the specific needs of black women. And she offered a thesis as to why this is so: white women figure as the subject of feminism, and black men figure as the subject of antiracism. She continues:
- It is precisely because intersectionality is so imperfect—ambiguous and open-ended—that it has been so productive for contemporary feminist scholarship. Its lack of clear-cut definition or even specific parameters has enabled it to be drawn upon in nearly any context of inquiry. The infinite regress built into the concept—which categories to use and when to stop—makes it vague, yet also allows endless constellations of intersecting lines of difference to be explored. With each new intersection, new connections emerge and previously hidden exclusions come to light. . . . Intersectionality initiates a process of discovery, alerting us to the fact that the world around us is always more complicated and contradictory than we ever could have anticipated. It compels us to grapple with this complexity in our scholarship.
- In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw published “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics.” With the publication of this article, Crenshaw introduced the world to the concept of “intersectionality,” a term that refers to “the interaction between gender, race, and other categories of difference in individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements, and cultural ideologies and the outcomes of these interactions in terms of power.” The impact of this article cannot easily be overstated: together with a subsequent article published by Crenshaw two years later that further developed the idea of intersectionality, it changed the way that academics in a variety of disciplines, practitioners, government actors, and activists all over the world think and talk about the experiences of multiply subordinated individuals and groups.
- The concept of intersectionality was born of Crenshaw’s frustration that courts had refused to recognize that black women could be discriminated against as and women during that period of time. This suggested to the court that General Motors had not engaged in sex discrimination. The court then stated that the black women plaintiffs’ suit ought to be joined with a race discrimination suit that had been filed by a group that included black male plaintiffs. This revealed the court’s assumption that the discrimination confronted by black men and black women was court’s logic suggested that if an employer hired black men and white women while refusing to hire a single black woman, black women would have no recourse. The structural impediments or individual bias that might uniquely restrict black women’s access to institutional spaces would be unchallengeable.
- That is, because there are many aspects of identity and many practices/ideologies of subordination (and privilege), it might be impossible to identify all that are relevant. Further, even if they all can be identified, listing them all might be unmanageable, and analyses that endeavor to investigate their synergistic interaction may slip into incoherence. (Indeed, consider the above description of the way that poverty is constituted by racism and sexism, and racism by poverty and sexism, and sexism by racism and poverty. Imagine if that description had attempted to describe the co-constitutive nature of not only racism, sexism, and poverty, but also sexuality, gender identity, immigration status, religion, age, and language. If that description had been attempted, this chapter would be much longer than it already is. . . .). The problem of the “illimitable process of signification itself” counsels Butler and like-minded theorists to reject attempts to identify all possible axes by...
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Chapter 9 Racial Microaggressions 181 49 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Chester Pierce, a black psychologist, is credited with birthing the concept of the racial microaggression. Pierce, who wrote more than 180 books and articles over the course of a career that spanned four decades, focused much of his scholarship on the study of racism in its modern iterations, endeavoring to strategize ways to preserve the mental and physical health of people of color in an age where overt and obvious acts of racism had become relatively uncommon. In a chapter titled “Offensive Mechanisms,” published in 1970, Pierce introduced the term “microaggression,” writing:
- The biggest criticism of the concept of microaggressions is probably the claim that they are no big deal. Everyone endures slights. You get cut off in traffic. You hold a door for someone and the person does not say “thank you.” Your coworker sends you a passive aggressive email that ends with “please advise.” You get tagged in an unflattering photo on social media. Essentially, the criticism is that
- Pierce, alongside other researchers who have come to develop the concept further, contend that microaggressions are meaningful and deserve study for many reasons. First, they propose that there is a close relationship between microaggressions and implicit bias, a topic that has received much attention in recent years (Implicit bias is explored in Chapter 8). Microaggressions oftentimes are described as “automatic”—as manifestations of implicit attitudes or associations. Consider the white professor who sees a black student and remembers, quite suddenly, that she forgot to lock her office door. When asked, the professor would likely deny that she associates young black men with criminal behavior. She would likely profess her belief that all people ought to be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. She might even take offense if anyone were to suggest that the race (and gender and age) of the black student that she encountered prompted her comment....
- because this stress is part of our day-to-day experience and is so common that we almost take it for granted; because it has an extreme impact on our psyche and world view, how we see ourselves, behave, and interact; , because it is environmentally located, induced and fostered; because the ultimate impact is indeed stressful, detracting and energy-consuming.
- as education increases, Black men are being exposed to more historically and predominantly White communities and institutions where the bedrock of racial microaggressions and faulty racial ideologies are more imbedded and less subtle. . . . In predominantly White communities, African Americans have fewer opportunities to maintain the relative comfort of community social support found in predominantly Black communities and its social and religious organizations.
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Summary of Contents 42 results (showing 5 best matches)
Chapter 11 The Relationship Between Race and Class 215 74 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The idea that race might produce class, specifically class stratification, may be more intuitive than the idea that class stratification has produced race. But, the concept of poverty and wealth producing race becomes easier to grasp when one accepts the proposition that race is a social construction. As discussed in Chapter 6, the claim that race is a social construction is the idea that race is not natural in any sense of the word. Rather, race is that societies create about differences among humans. Importantly, these ideas become material—tangible, visible, capable of being apprehended by the senses—as they are reflected, and are made to be reflected, in material conditions. So, the idea that black people are averse to work becomes material as they endure higher rates of unemployment than their white counterparts. The idea that Latinx people are hardworking becomes material as undocumented immigrants from Latin America are compelled to accept any job that they can find. And so on
- talk about unregulated markets, individual preferences, reduced investment in people and social and physical infrastructure, tax cuts for big business, and other policy choices is not just economic talk or class talk but race talk. That is, these policies have the effect of preserving the racialized status quo of current arrangements and their primary beneficiaries, with all its inequities, while also increasing economic inequality and the concentration of wealth in these beneficiaries’ hands. In other words, free market talk is often race talk.
- Delgado proposes that when CRT was in its earliest stages, the thinkers who would come to be critical race theorists concerned themselves with what was happening out there on the ground. Delgado states that these thinkers were “realists,” convinced that “material factors such as profits and the labor market” relegated people of color to the lowest rungs of the nation’s racial hierarchy. Racial realists examined “the role of international relations and competition, the interests of elite groups, and the changing demands of the labor market in hopes of understanding the twists and turn of racial fortunes, including the part the legal system plays in that history.” Delgado contrasts racial realists—who focused “on how race works in the real world, and the way it functions as an ordering principle in a world of power, resources, and privilege” —with “idealists,” whose foundational assumption is that “race and discrimination are largely functions of attitude and social formation.”
- race is a social construction created out of words, symbols, stereotypes, and categories. As such, we may purge discrimination by ridding ourselves of the texts, narratives, ideas, and meanings that give rise to it and that convey the message that people of other racial groups are unworthy, lazy, and dangerous. These writers analyze hate speech, media images, census categories, and such issues as intersectionality and essentialism. They analyze unconscious or institutional racism and show how cognitive theory exposes a host of preconceptions, baselines, and mindsets that operate below the level of consciousness to render certain people consistently one-down.
- Progressive thinkers about race cite the statistics above as evidence of the close relationship between race and class in the U.S. That is, if one has race privilege, one is more likely to have class privilege. And the reverse is also true: if one lacks race privilege, one is more likely to be unprivileged along class lines. These scholars propose that there is a tight, frequently symbiotic relationship between race and class. Athena Mutua describes it in the following way: “[R]ace itself is a system for allocating resources but one that is part and parcel of, or intertwined with the class system, even as it operates independently and relatedly as a belief system that provides a ready justification for the racialized results of various distributions.”
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Chapter 18 The Criminal Justice System 377 97 results (showing 5 best matches)
- With respect to crime and criminal punishment, residents of neighborhoods have two warring incentives. On the one hand, they want safe streets on which to walk and drive and go about their business; they want to travel to parks and sporting events and grocery stores without fearing for their lives and property. On the other hand, they are loath to incarcerate their sons and brothers, neighbors and friends. The desire for order and the longing for freedom, anger at crime and empathy for the young men whom police officers arrest and prosecutors charge—both forces are powerful, and they push in opposite directions. . . . Local political control over criminal justice harnesses both forces, without giving precedence to either.
- Alexander contends that although the racial nature of the criminal justice system and mass incarceration is obvious, it nevertheless operates in an ostensibly race-blind fashion. Those who are its architects, as well as those who endorse it, have never needed to confess an aspiration to dominate or regulate black people. Instead, proposes Alexander, they have only needed to articulate a concern about “crime,” declaring that they are worried about the decline of “law and order” and stating that the country needs to take back the streets from “criminals.” Thus, Alexander proposes, defenders of mass incarceration never need to make the case that the present system of racial control is just and right—as segregationists and other defenders of the old Jim Crow had to do from time to time. Instead, defenders of mass incarceration only need to deny that it is a system of ...As Brewer and Heitzeg put it, “[T]he reliance on the criminal system provides the color-blind racist regime the...
- Delgado and Stefancic maintain that Alexander and others are correct when they propose that “[i]mprisonment removes African-Americans—particularly young men, often for drug offenses—from the street, the voting rolls, and the job market, thus reducing competition with whites over jobs [and] political power.” However, they note that while the criminal justice system is the institution that operates to exclude black people from the polity, other institutions operate to exclude Latinx, indigenous, Asian, and Muslim peoples. They write,
- Imprisonment, then, removes blacks from the American mainstream, whereas deportations and their specter accomplish the same for Latinos. . . . History reveals a similar pattern for Native Americans. The Discovery Doctrine and, a few years later, the Trail of Tears, the Dawes Act, and relocation to reservations removed them from land and opportunities that whites coveted. For Asians, Chinese Exclusion, alien land laws, and wartime removal of Japanese-Americans achieved much the same. For Muslims, and Middle Eastern people, close surveillance, profiling, and demands for immigration restriction send the message that they are unwelcome.
- Does the possibility of prison abolition sound appealing to you in an intuitive sense? Why or why not? Those who support abolishing prisons oftentimes emphasize that “[i]ncarceration, for people of all races and genders, is violent and dehumanizing.” Can you think of ways to punish that are not violent and dehumanizing? Can you imagine a prison system that is not violent and dehumanizing? If so, what are some of its features? Do you think that violence and dehumanization is, sometimes, an appropriate feature of punishment?
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Chapter 19 The Welfare State 407 101 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Wacquant insists that the welfare state and the criminal justice system are both issues of racial justice because they both manage the same population. He writes that the “social silhouette of [the persons who are beneficiaries of the programs that provide cash assistance to indigent families] turns out to be a marital status, and history with abuse and violence, the population that receives cash assistance for poor families is identical to the incarcerated population. The only difference that he observes between the two populations is gender: women disproportionately are the subjects of the welfare state, while men disproportionately are the subjects of the penal state. On this point, he writes, “[T]he primary clients of the assitantial and carceral wings of the neoliberal state are essentially the two gender sides of the same population coin drawn from the marginalized fractions of the postindustrial working class. The state regulates the troublesome behaviors of these women (and...
- When compared to the nations that the U.S. tends to consider its peers, the welfare state that the country has erected is quite meager. It is “more fragmented and less universal than the welfare states of most other developed democratic nations—prone to division between generous social insurance policies for workers and stingy and punitive public assistance benefits for the poor . . . and lacking policies that most other countries provide, such as universal health insurance, family allowances, [and] child-care.”
- Another crucial phenomenon that critical scholars claim helped to racialize welfare as black was the increasing success that black women had in accessing welfare. In the late 1960s, poor black women began challenging the many impediments that local governments and administrators had erected to block their access to public assistance. The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) was a major player in this movement. The NWRO had 22,000 members and branches in all fifty states at its height in 1969. Its members engaged in protests—including sit-ins and mass demonstrations—in order to force changes in the rules that had excluded poor black mothers, but not poor white mothers, from AFDC rolls. Further, litigation in the courts served as a complement to the agitation taking place in the streets. And the lawyers and the indigent black mothers that they represented won. In a series of cases, the Supreme Court struck down the “man in the house” and “employable mother” rules, constrained...
- As discussed in this chapter, the welfare state in the U.S. consists of a wide variety of programs that are designed to support and protect citizens and residents. However, when most Americans think of , they tend to think only of the most stigmatized and racialized programs that help poor people—ADC/AFDC and TANF.
- While progressive race scholars underscore the role of race when analyzing welfare, other thinkers have different emphases. As noted above, feminists tend to emphasize the role of sex and gender. They stress that “welfare state policies help to sustain and reproduce patriarchy,” and they assume that the “drive to maintain male dominance and the patriarchal family is . . . the principal force shaping the formation, implementation, and outcomes of U.S. welfare policy.”
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Acknowledgments v 3 results
- I am grateful to the many people who helped bring this book to life. Thanks to Khaled Beydoun, Osagie Obasogie, and David Rossman for offering incisive comments on several of the book’s chapters. I am incredibly indebted to Kristina Fried, Michael Onah, and Chelsea Tejada for their impeccable research assistance. Thanks to Ryan Pfeiffer at Foundation Press for inviting me to write this book and for being such a wonderful editor. (And thanks to Jim Fleming, my brilliant and generous colleague, for sending Ryan my way!) Thanks as well to Staci Herr at Foundation Press for all of the help that she provided.
- A special debt of gratitude is owed to my immediate family—Clive Bridges, Deborah Bridges, Khari Bridges, and Algeria Bridges—for making me into who I am today. Thanks to Mams and Paps Reynaert, , for welcoming me into the family and being so very good to me. And, of course, thank you to Gert Reynaert,
- I am forever grateful to Kendall Thomas, my mentor and friend, for introducing me to Critical Race Theory when I was just a baby. Thank you to the community of critical race theorists and progressive race scholars who insist upon challenging the status quo and dreaming of a just world. Thank you for developing the audacious, powerful, inspired theory that I humbly describe in this book.
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Acknowledgments 2 results
- Portions of chapter 2 were previously published in Jens Meierhenrich and Martin Loughlin, eds.,
- Portions of chapters 5 and 7 were previously published in Khiara M. Bridges, “Excavating Race-Based Disadvantage Among Class-Privileged People of Color,” 53 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 65 (2018).
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Editorial Board 5 results
- Publication Date: December 5th, 2018
- ISBN: 9781683284437
- Subject: Race and the Law
- Series: Concepts and Insights
- Type: Hornbook Treatises
-
Description:
This highly-readable primer on Critical Race Theory (CRT) examines the theory’s basic commitments, strengths, and weaknesses. In addition to serving as a primary text for graduate and undergraduate Critical Race Theory seminars or courses on Race and the Law, it can also be assigned in courses on Antidiscrimination Law, Civil Rights, and Law and Society. The book can be used by any reader seeking to understand the relationship between constructions of race and the law.
The text consists of four Parts. Part I provides a history of CRT. Part II introduces and explores several core concepts in the theory—including institutional/structural racism, implicit bias, microaggressions, racial privilege, the relationship between race and class, and intersectionality. Part III builds on Part II’s discussion of intersectionality by exploring the intersection of race with a variety of other characteristics—including sexuality and gender identity, religion, and ability. Part IV analyzes several contemporary issues to which CRT speaks—including racial disparities in health, affirmative action, the criminal justice system, the welfare state, and education.
