Critical Race Theory: A Primer
Author:
Bridges, Khiara M.
Edition:
1st
Copyright Date:
2019
24 chapters
have results for racial justice
Introduction 1 40 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Scholars who produce CRT scholarship are all committed to racial justice, but they disagree on just what racial justice looks like. Some imagine that a racially just world is one where race exists (i.e., people have racial identities and there are differences between racial group); but, there is no inequality between racial groups. Others imagine that a racially just world is one where race has been eliminated; it is no longer a category that usefully describes groups or people. What does racial justice look like to you? Why?
- As Part I of this book explores, CRT emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when the prevailing sense was that the law was not at all involved in creating and sustaining racial hierarchies. Prior to the advent of CRT, most in the legal academy had embraced the idea that norms of fairness, equality, and justice guided the law. Accordingly, they found it difficult to contemplate that the law could be involved in creating a society that, racially speaking, is unfair, unequal, and unjust. The intellectual forefather of CRT, Derrick Bell, was one of the first to challenge this view. Bell, the first black tenured professor at Harvard Law School, devoted his scholarship to exploring how it came to be that black people remained at the bottom of practically every measure of social wellbeing, even though the Civil Rights Movement had forced the passage of laws that ostensibly were designed to end black people’s subordination. Bell concluded that racial inequality endured in a post-civil...
- Do you believe that CRT’s commitment to using scholarship to further the cause of racial justice—that is, its instrumentality—poses a problem? If so, what problem does it pose? Do you believe that instrumental scholarship necessarily lacks “balance, nuance, and a weighing of insider and outsider perspectives”? Is there a way for instrumental scholarship to be both political
- 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...
- While CRT does not deny that individual bad actors do bad acts that harm racial minorities, it does not conceptualize these acts as bearing the primary responsibility for racial inequality’s persistence. Instead, CRT proposes that, in the post-civil rights era, rational structures, institutions, and discourses do the bulk of the work of creating and maintaining racial hierarchies. Which is to say: CRT proposes that racial disenfranchisement is an entirely rational mechanism.
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Chapter 20 Education 437 42 results (showing 5 best matches)
- For many, a book about racial justice in the U.S. is incomplete without a discussion of education. Education, many believe, is the key to racial equality. The idea is that if we achieve racial equity in education, then we can hope to achieve racial equity along other lines—like income, housing, wealth, and health. The converse might also be true: if there is no justice in education, then racial justice will never be realized. In this vein, Daniel Kiel describes the “[e]ducation of children [as] a crucial tool for a shaping society.”
- was a flawed decision not simply because subsequent iterations of the Court retreated from it, but rather because it reflected a limited vision of racial justice. The critique is that did not endeavor to end white dominance and black subordination; it simply sought to dismantle racial hierarchy in the form that it took at the time of the decision. As a result, the case left open the door for racial inequality to be reconfigured in a different form. This, say these theorists, is precisely what happened with the
- The development of CRT in the field of education is also a response to popular approaches that the field has taken to thinking about issues of race and racial inequality in education. A framework that has enjoyed a great deal of popularity in recent decades has been that of multicultural education. As Ladson-Billings and Tate describe it, “[m]ulticultural education has been conceptualized as a reform movement designed to effect change in the ‘school and other educational institutions so that students from diverse racial, ethnic, and other social-class groups will experience educational equality.’ In more recent years multicultural education has expanded to include issues of gender, ability, and sexual orientation.” The framework conceptualizes the question of justice in education as one of It declares that justice will be realized when marginalized groups have been
- , the decision must have felt like a complete and utter triumph to anyone with an interest in racial justice. More than sixty years after the decision was handed down, however, many progressive thinkers about race wonder whether the hullabaloo that surrounded was much ado about nothing. Well over half a century after civil rights lawyers scored one of their most significant victories, racial segregation in schools appears to remain the order of the day. In a 2012 study, researchers describe the dramatic extent to which
- Bell, the case did not reflect a society realizing the error of its ways and vowing to do right by its racial minority citizens. In his view, was not about racial justice. Instead, Bell claims that
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Chapter 8 Implicit Bias 157 36 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Where do you come out in this debate? Should people interested in racial justice devote significant amounts of energy to buttressing their claims with “science”? What should be the role of science in the struggle for racial justice? What should be the relationship between science and law?
- The existence of implicit biases may have significant implications for racial justice. Implicit racial biases may play a key role in the persistence of racial inequality in the post-civil rights era. For example, the fact that an overwhelming majority of people associate black people with negative traits, like criminality, may explain why people of color are stopped, frisked, arrested, indicted, and convicted more often than their comparably situated white peers. Indeed, it may explain the nation’s choice to use the criminal justice system as a principal means for addressing its social problems. It may explain the lack of real public outrage over the reality that this approach to addressing social problems has resulted in the mass incarceration of high numbers—both absolute and relative—of black and Latinx people.
- Moreover, even if science manages to persuade the skeptic that implicit biases against historically disadvantaged groups exist, science cannot tell us what we should do about them. That is, the descriptive claim that implicit biases are pervasive does not translate into the normative claim that they should be addressed in law and policy. Consider that Justice Scalia once argued that the existence of implicit bias should mean , the case in which the Court declared the constitutionality of the death penalty despite good statistical evidence that racial bias made it more likely that black defendants would be sentenced to death. The evidence suggested that the biases that led juries to vote for the death penalty for black defendants—and the biases that led prosecutors to seek the death penalty in the first instance—were implicit: these actors likely were not aware of them. In response to this evidence, Justice Scalia wrote a memo to his colleagues in which he stated that while implicit...
- 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.
- Implicit racial biases refer to the unconscious associations we make about racial groups. The existence of these biases is consistent with the conclusion of more general research that we automatically and unconsciously use heuristics to cope with the enormous amount of information that bombards us. Implicit racial biases facilitate our ability to manage information overload and make decisions more efficiently and easily by filtering information, filling in missing data, and automatically categorizing people according to cultural stereotypes.
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Chapter 19 The Welfare State 407 20 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Some may be a bit perplexed by the inclusion of a chapter on the welfare state in a primer that is about race. These folks may feel that the U.S.’s safety net is not a racial issue in the same way that the criminal justice system or education, for example, are racial issues. However, progressive scholarship seeks to challenge this belief. The work of Kimberlé Crenshaw—specifically, her theory of intersectionality, explored in Chapter 12—is instructive here. Crenshaw’s work counsels that the intuition that the welfare state is not a racial issue, and that it fails to implicate questions of racial justice, is likely a product of the belief that the black is the true racial subject. ...this view, the issues that we understand as affecting black men, like mass incarceration, are easily understood as racial issues. Meanwhile, matters that disproportionately impact black women—like the approach that the welfare state has taken to supporting poor, female-headed households—are not thought...
- Additionally, many scholars have observed that the government’s policies around public benefits mirror its criminal justice policies. They say that both sets of policies are born of the
- 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 ...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 their children) through workfare and those of the men in their lives . . . through criminal justice...
- Thus, progressive thinkers suggest that the welfare state in the U.S. grew patchily and unevenly because the desire to keep people of color at the bottom of the country’s racial hierarchy prevented the welfare state from developing in any other way. Moreover, these scholars insist that the effect that race has had on the welfare system is ongoing. As Soss and his coauthors write, “The racial character of the contemporary system is more than just a legacy of our troubled racial past. It is a reflection of how race operates today as a
- Robert Lieberman proposes that part of the reason for the countries that the U.S. considers its peers having a more universal safety net is that their racial others existed outside of the national borders. In the U.S., black people were presumptive citizens and, therefore, entitled to make demands that were equal to those that white people could make. However, in other countries, like the United Kingdom, nonwhite people largely were outside the national borders—in the colonies, to be specific. In these nations, the creation of a universal welfare state could unite the citizens against the racial other who lived outside of the country. As Lieberman explains the effect that colonialism had on the creation of the safety net in Great Britain, “[T]he presumption of racial homogeneity at home allowed for the construction of welfare systems with more forceful and authoritative means of connecting individual citizens to the state. . . .
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Chapter 4 The LatCrit Intervention 83 32 results (showing 5 best matches)
- paradigm oftentimes has stood for “U.S.-born black.” This functions to erase black people living outside of the nation and their experiences with racial power—despite the fact that their experiences mirror those of U.S.-born black people. Thus, according to these critics, the black-white paradigm has disallowed thinkers from seeing the interconnected nature of systems of subordination. Narrowing one’s focus to domestic issues—and believing that racial justice is a purely domestic issue—precludes scholars from recognizing that global capitalism invariably produces conflicts between groups, and that these conflicts are frequently played out in racialized terms. Moreover, if globalization has linked racial conflicts in other nations with those in the U.S., then fighting for racial justice abroad might be essential to the realization of racial justice “at home.”
- Second, it is true that the Civil Rights Movement produced much of the country’s antidiscrimination laws and developed a language that has been borrowed by subsequent movements for social justice. Yet, it is also true that black people were not the only ones marching, protesting, and dying in the struggle against racial power during this time. The movement for social justice in the 1950s and 1960s was one that was peopled by persons of various racial identities and ascriptions.
- The second claim in support of black exceptionalism posits that black people are foundational to the country in a way that other racial groups are not. Antidiscrimination law in the U.S. is, in many respects, responses to black people’s demands for inclusion. The into the body politic. Further, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which provides the statutory framework under which all racial minorities (as well as women) are protected from discrimination in public life—is a response to the demands that ...the Civil Rights Movement. Further still, the language that black people used during the Civil Rights Movement has been deployed by other groups in their fights for justice. As Harris writes, “The moral claim to inclusion that African Americans made during the 1960s civil rights movement has become the rhetorical template for all subsequent civil rights struggles. Abortion protesters now sing ‘We Shall Overcome’; gay and lesbian activists liken marriage restrictions to miscegenation laws...
- In light of globalization having made winners and losers of white and nonwhite people, do we need a specific racial justice-based critique of globalization? What do we gain by such a critique? What do we lose if we do not have this critique?
- 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.” LatCrit challenges us to wonder how racial disenfranchisement in the U.S. might change if the country conceptualized race in a way that is more fluid than it is now—if class privilege, for example, might allow individuals to change racial groups. Would things be better or worse for racial minorities?
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Chapter 2 The Conservatism of Liberal Discourse on Race 35 45 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Indeed, in 1982, Reagan tapped Clarence Thomas to be the Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces Title VII of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964. Thomas’s subsequent tenure as a Supreme Court Justice, having revealed in great detail his extremely conservative conception of racial justice and the role that law ought to play in achieving it, illuminates the nature of the Reagan era reversal on racial justice reform.
- 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...
- At the time of CRT’s emergence in the 1980s, many liberals perceived the country to be in the midst of a retreat from the commitment to racial justice that the Civil Rights Movement had seemingly forced the nation to make. Then-President Ronald Reagan had filled the federal judiciary with politically conservative judges who handed down exceedingly narrow interpretations of the newly minted civil rights laws, drastically limiting their reach and effect. Moreover, he appointed as heads of the agencies charged with implementing and enforcing civil rights laws individuals who were hostile to racial justice reforms. liberals’ racial justice goals with
- As this chapter explains, CRT has criticized liberals for having an impoverished vision of what racial justice looks like. CRT argues that racial justice, from a liberal standpoint, is society as presently arranged sans racist individuals in positions of power. Once those with biases and prejudices are removed from public life, liberals imagine that people of color will come to occupy the social, cultural, political, and economic roles that they ought to occupy.
- It is worth noting that both liberals and conservatives declare colorblindness to be the approach to racial justice that our increasingly racially enlightened society should adopt. Consider the Court’s 2007 decision in In an effort to achieve a small measure of racial integration in their schools, two school boards allowed a student’s race to be one factor in determining the school to which she would be assigned. The school boards’ plans were eventually challenged, and the Court struck them down, holding that they violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the course of so doing, Chief Justice Roberts declared that “[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
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Chapter 18 The Criminal Justice System 377 57 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Thus, Delgado and Stefancic contend that Alexander’s narrow attention to the criminal justice system as a mechanism of racial control over black people causes her to miss the others systems that serve as mechanisms of racial control over other nonwhite groups.
- While these numbers, in and of themselves, might be disconcerting to social justice-minded individuals, they become even more disturbing when the racial geography of the U.S.’s prison population is considered: people of color, particularly black people, are disproportionately represented among those who are presently incarcerated. While black people constitute 12% of the U.S. population, they constitute 33% of the prison population. Some scholars have noted that while there are black-white racial disparities across many areas of social life, the racial disparities in incarceration rates are the worst. Bennett Capers, for one, observes that black-white racial disparities in unemployment are two to one, wealth are one to four, and infant mortality are two to one; however, racial disparities in incarceration rates are eight to one.
- Does this proposal strike you as true? Why or why not? If there was a way to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system without engaging race directly, do you think that we should pursue that course? Why or why not?
- 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 racial control in the first instance. As Brewer and Heitzeg put it, “[T]he reliance on the criminal system provides the...
- Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic have argued that while there is much to laud about Alexander’s proposition that mass incarceration is a racial caste system that is appropriately analogized to the Jim Crow of the 1870s through 1960s, her account ultimately is deficient. They claim that the deficiency is a product of Alexander’s almost exclusive focus on mass incarceration They contend that if Alexander had broadened her focus, she would have seen that other nonwhite racial groups confront societal institutions that function to subjugate them in a manner that is similar to the way in which the criminal justice system subjugates black people.
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Chapter 16 Health 319 61 results (showing 5 best matches)
- As discussed above, lack of access to health insurance and health care is an important contributor to racial disparities in health. Should universal health care—whether it is provided through the ACA or through alternative legislation—be understood as an issue of racial justice? What are the benefits of framing it in those terms? What are the dangers?
- Can you think of a legitimate justification for addressing crack cocaine addiction through the criminal justice system and opioid addiction through alternative, non-punitive systems? What does racial justice look like in the context of the opioid epidemic? Does it look like more punishment of white people who are addicted to opioids? Does it look like less punishment of people of color who are addicted to other controlled substances?
- Finally, for those who disapprove of the idea of post-racialism and its suggestion that the nation has entered a period wherein race is an insignificant fact of life, genetic explanations for racial disparities in health appear to be a convenient explanation for enduring racial inequality. That is, few would deny that racial inequality endures in the present day; racial disparities in health are an instance of this enduring inequality. However, if we have entered a historical moment wherein race really does not matter—a post-racial time when race no longer plays the role that it did in previous eras in our nation’s history, when it cruelly determined the content and trajectory of an individual’s life—then has to explain why racial groups are still socially, politically, and economically unequal to one another. Biological differences between the races supply that explanation. In identifying a cause for enduring racial inequality that is neither social nor political nor economic,...
- The easiest and least contested source of stress is poverty. Poverty in most countries, including the U.S., invariably introduces the impoverished to a number of stressors—including financial uncertainty, state regulation by virtue of dependence on social welfare programs, violent neighborhoods, family separation due to the criminal justice system or the child welfare system, struggles with drug abuse and addiction, and chronic illness. Because racial minorities disproportionately bear the burdens of poverty, they disproportionately are exposed to these poverty-related stressors.
- If physicians harbor racial biases, these biases can either be consciously-held or unconsciously-held. Dayna Bowen Matthew—who has done the most work of late around the idea that unconscious biases held by health care providers might explain racial disparities in health —notes that physicians are like the general public inasmuch as precious few admit to harboring negative attitudes about any particular racial group. (And we probably do not gain much from disbelieving their accounts.) For this reason, Matthew concludes that physicians’ racial biases likely cannot account for racial disparities in health. If physicians’ choices around which treatments to prescribe are harming their patients of color, it is unlikely that physicians are intentionally doing so.
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Chapter 11 The Relationship Between Race and Class 215 33 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The thing is that Delgado and like-minded critics would not disagree. Delgado does not deny the importance of the ideal in racial stratification. However, he feels strongly that the material is doing most of the work. He writes of his sense that material factors much of the racial inequality that we see. Idealist factors—discourse—are merely an If Delgado is right, then one does not undo racial hierarchy by changing discourse. If he is right, we will not achieve racial justice, however defined, by transforming meanings around race. According to Delgado, racial justice will be won by intervening in the material factors that disproportionately make white people winners and nonwhite people losers. When the material has been altered, we can expect that the ideal will convert in light of it.
- If Mutua is onto something, it means that the racial stratification that we witness in the U.S. today will not be undone until we reduce, or eliminate, economic inequality. In other words, if class produces race, then when we not achieve racial justice until we have achieved economic justice. At the same time, other scholars warn that the achievement of economic justice will not necessarily lead to the achievement of racial justice. In other words, they assert that when class oppression has been eliminated, racial oppression may still endure. Accordingly, they caution us against reducing our racial problems to our class system. Race and class are intermingled with one another, they say. But, they remain distinct.
- In truth, it is probably wrong to say that discourse is wholly insignificant where questions of racial inequality are concerned. It undeniably plays role. In Kevin Johnson’s view, the material world is intimately connected with ideas about race. As such, understanding race requires an understanding of that interrelationship. “Idealist discourse helps us understand how society rationalizes racial subordination that power disparities create.” As an example, he looks to the poor education that many racial minorities receive. These are educations that are a product of material factors: residential segregation as well as the nation’s practice of funding public schools through property taxes. How does the nation, which professes commitment to justice and equality, become comfortable with this unjust and unequal result? Johnson answers: discourse. “Discourse scholarship helps us understand how the dominant justify the current state of unequal affairs and forestall calls for reform.”
- However, when one compares the black middle class to their white counterparts—that is, the white middle class—the picture becomes less rosy. Indeed, critical thinkers encourage us to judge wealthier racial minorities against those who share their class privilege, as opposed to those who share their racial ascription. It is then, they say, that their subordination is thrown into sharp relief.
- 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” He writes that for racial idealists,
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Chapter 17 Affirmative Action 343 70 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Justice Powell rejected the dissenters’ approach, arguing that both “benign” and “invidious” uses of race ought to be reviewed with strict scrutiny. He admitted that the drafters of the Equal Protection Clause had the intention of making one specific racial minority group—African Americans, who had recently been held as slaves—equal to the white majority. However, he claimed that the racial geography of the country had changed since the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. The shift in racial demographics made it inappropriate to speak of a “white majority.” In Powell’s view, the white majority was, in fact, a grouping that consisted of various minority groups: the Irish, the German, the Italian, the Russian, etc. According to Powell, all of the various minority groups, both white and nonwhite, were similarly situated to one another; they were as likely to be the perpetrators of racial discrimination as they were to be the victims of racial discrimination. Powell surmised that...
- 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. ; yet subsuming them within the broad category 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/or economically disadvantaged and the cases in which that ...an affirmative action program with this sophisticated understanding of race and race-based hardship is, of course, much more difficult than administering a program that imagines that there are five races and that there is a similarity of racial experience...
- Opponents of race-conscious programs have argued that these efforts are illegal and ill-advised because they are divisive. As Justice O’Connor wrote in her dissent in , “the dangers of such classifications are clear. They endorse race-based reasoning and the conception of a Nation divided into racial blocs, thus contributing to an escalation of racial hostility and conflict.”
- Parts of Justice Thomas’s dissent in Remarkably, if these comments reflect a disquietude with race-based affirmative action that is born of a sense that racial inequality in this country will not be solved by the admission of a few racial minorities to a few elite institutions every year, then Justice Thomas—a staunch conservative—may find intellectual bedfellows with progressive race scholars. Their critique of affirmative action is described below.
- racial group. Thus, if an employer decides that it wants to ensure that black apprentices comprise half of a training program, then the employer has to decide who qualifies as “black.” Some have thought this to be a dangerous and repulsive pursuit. For example, Justice Stevens has argued that “the very attempt to define with precision a beneficiary’s qualifying racial characteristics is repugnant to our constitutional ideals,” and he noted that the institutions attempting to construct these definitions might look to Nazi Germany for guidance. Similarly, Justice Kennedy has offered that institutions might turn to South Africa—specifically, the laws that implemented and administered the political and social system of apartheid—for precedent in crafting their definitions of race.
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Chapter 13 The Intersection of Race and Sexuality 253 28 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Finally, scholars with a critical bent have been disquieted by the way that the analogy suggests that black people have arrived—as if the fight against racism and racial hierarchies has been won. The analogy suggests that sexual minorities should want to be “like” racial minorities, particularly black people, because they are no longer subordinated. However, those interested in racial justice deny that we have arrived at a racial utopia that is worthy of any group’s envy. Despite all of the existing legal protections against racial discrimination, Robinson notes that black people continue to struggle against “mass incarceration, homelessness, unemployment, and health disparities, such as HIV/AIDS.” In light of these social realities, a more appropriate analogy might propose that the discrimination that LGBTQ people currently face is like a particular form of discrimination that racial minorities once faced—formal disenfranchisement from a set of rights. While that narrow slice of
- At the same time that gay rights advocacy has paid little to no attention to the particular experiences of LGBTQ persons of color, advocacy for the equality of racial minorities has committed the same sin. That is, antiracist organizations, for the most part, have not conceptualized issues that affect LGBTQ persons of color as issues of
- Hutchinson argues that antiracist political organizations’ refusal to challenge the sexual subordination that LGBTQ people of color endure is doubly unfortunate in light of the fact that antiracist advocacy has always challenged sexual subordination. As Part II of this chapter discusses, racial disenfranchisement historically has taken sexualized forms. For example, since the first contact between ...sexuality of black women functioned to deny the possibility that a black woman would ever withhold consent to sexual contact. Accordingly, the law historically has failed to recognize the sexual abuse of black women as a crime. Hutchinson observes that antiracist politics, throughout history, have challenged both the construction of black people as problematically (hetero)sexual as well as the material consequences of that construction. Thus, antiracist politics are well-versed in recognizing how ideas about sexuality have supported and legitimated racial subordination. However, this...
- 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
- Scholars studying the intersection of race and sexuality on the macro level have observed at least two situations in which the two discourses can be said to intersect. In the first, sexuality is weaponized in order to demonize racial others. In the second, race is sexualized in a way that justifies and legitimates violence on racial outgroups.
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Chapter 3 Critiques of Critical Race Theory 57 29 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The goal . . . is not to simply “improve” critical race theory by incorporating empirical methods, nor is it to simply “improve” social science research through integrating critical race perspectives. Instead, we seek to rethink and change the premise of race scholarship in general by eschewing theoretical and methodological silos in pursuit of deepening our understanding of race and racism to advance racial justice.
- Additionally, the suggestion that there is a similarity of perspective among people of color that crosses class lines is one that critics of Matsuda’s argument find incredulous. They would argue that while class privilege may not entirely immunize people of color from racial oppression, class privilege certainly does allow for different experiences of that racial oppression. Is not the racial disenfranchisement endured by the indigent person of color trapped in a hypersegregated, heavily policed, disinvested neighborhood different from the racial disenfranchisement endured by his more affluent counterpart in the suburbs? Is not the racial oppression sustained by a transgender woman of color who relies upon public benefits for her financial viability different from the racial oppression sustained by her economically self-sufficient cisgender counterpart? If we answer these questions in the affirmative, then it might be ..., as their experiences with racial disadvantage have been...
- 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.
- 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-...
- Matsuda, one of the founders of CRT, has offered one of the most eloquent articulations of the assertion that nonwhite people possess a perspective—a voice—that is always and in every case different from that possessed by white people. Matsuda has argued that because racism is an unavoidable ubiquity in the United States, all people of color living in the country have endured it. According to Matsuda, this common experience of racial oppression has created in every nonwhite person a distinct way of viewing the world and the law that organizes it. This view is inevitably one that will not countenance the unjust subjugation of any person or group. As such, it is a view that is best able to describe a world in which racial justice reigns. Writes Matsuda, “Those who are oppressed in the present world can speak most eloquently of a better one. Their language will not be abstract, detached or inaccessible; their program will not be undefined. They will advance clear ideas about the next...
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Chapter 5 Other Crits 101 25 results (showing 5 best matches)
- However, those utilizing a QueerCrit framework would disagree. They argue that just as a person’s racial identity and ascription shape the form that homophobia and cisnormativity take in his/her/their life, a person’s status as gay, transgender, or nonbinary shapes the form that racism takes in his/her/their life. This is to say that all people of color do not experience racial unprivilege in the same way. Just as a class-privileged person of color will live racial disadvantage quite differently from a poor person of color, a sexual minority of color will live racial disadvantage quite differently from a heterosexual, cisgender person of color. For example, while racial power operates to push heterosexual, cisgender persons of color into homes that are less valuable than the ones owned by white persons of the same income level, racial power operates to push transgender persons of color into homelessness—thereby making them vulnerable to the violence that frequently follows that status.
- ClassCrit theorists propose that the failure to investigate class is more than a harmless oversight. On the contrary, they propose that the failure to put class under the most rigorous of analyses makes it less likely that those who are interested in racial justice will be able to fully understand existing racial injustices; as a result, it makes it less likely that these scholars and activists will be able to produce the world about which they dream. According to ClassCrit, racial hierarchies will not be dismantled without also dismantling the structures that create and sustain class stratification. And the reverse is also true: the structures that create and sustain class stratification will not be dismantled without also dismantling race. As one of the primary architects of ClassCrit, Athena Mutua, writes, “it [is] not clear that the economic harms of lower class suffering would be eliminated without addressing both the material and psychological seductions embodied and...
- Class Crit proposes that class inequality and racial inequality are mutually constitutive. Thus, to conceptualize racial inequality apart from class inequality is to misapprehend the nature of racial inequality. Mutua has cogently explained the interdependency of
- [A]lthough both slavery and Jim Crow, as well as today’s oppressive racial spatial isolation, were racial systems that oppressed and offended human dignity, they also were economic systems meant to facilitate the exploitation of black labor, to deny black material well-being, and to assist the few in hoarding the resources created by the many. This racial system relationally also privileges whiteness both materially and psychologically through the full range of social systems and institutions including the economy, political system, educational system, etc., setting up a hierarchy of the “races” that renders black racial identity, among others, a racial status within a caste-like system where large numbers of blacks are part of the working poor but in which almost all blacks, even those of the black middle class, are both materially and expressively subordinate.
- Finally, APACrit contends that the model minority myth makes Asian Americans into tools with which other less successful racial groups can be chastised, thus setting the stage for antagonisms between Asian Americans and other nonwhite racial groups. The myth also reveals that racial groups are not simply defined vis-à-vis white people; they are also defined vis-à-vis other nonwhite people. Black people are defined not only in relationship to white people, but also in relationship to Asian, indigenous, and Latinx people. Latinx people are defined not in relationship to white people, but also in relationship to black, Asian, and indigenous people. And so on and so forth. Thus, any theory of race that solely considers a group’s relationship to white people misses something important. Ignoring the fact that a multiplicity of differently racialized groups has always coexisted in the U.S. and around the world is a recipe for an impoverished theory or race, racism, and racial inequality.
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Chapter 9 Racial Microaggressions 181 42 results (showing 5 best matches)
- As noted above, scholars have argued that not only can racial microaggressions cause their targets to have intense emotional responses ranging from rage to depression, but can also explain large-scale racial inequalities, like the racial performance gap and racial disparities in health. Do you find such claims convincing? Why or why not?
- William Smith and co-authors have theorized that the MEES produced by racial microaggressions causes “racial battle fatigue.” Racial battle fatigue involves the “psychological (e.g., frustration, shock, anger, disappointment, resentment, hopelessness), physiological (e.g., headache, backache, ‘butterflies,’ teeth grinding, high blood pressure, insomnia), and behavioral responses (e.g., stereotype threat, John Henryism, social withdrawal, self-doubt, and a dramatic change in diet) of fighting racial microaggressions.” Again, if racial microaggressions are something that people of color mostly endure, then we might understand the ability to avoid the psychological, physiological, and behavioral responses to these offenses as a racial privilege that many white people enjoy and many people of color do not have.
- Scholars who study microaggressions also link them to the large-scale racial stratifications that we witness in the nation today, arguing that they play a role in the persistence of racial disparities in education, employment, and other arenas. For example, Solórzano and co-authors contend that microaggressions produce college campuses as hostile environments. They write that students of color react to these hostile spaces in many ways. Some of these reactions might be considered productive. For example, many students of color who Solórzano studied reported that, when confronted with a microaggression that evoked narratives about the inferiority of racial minorities, they endeavored to prove the narrative wrong; they reported working harder in an effort to avoid fulfilling the stereotype of nonwhite inadequacy. However, other students of color reacted to microaggressions in ways that were quite damaging and destructive. “The sense of discouragement, frustration, and exhaustion...racial
- of the same. Individuals inflict racial microaggressions because discourses about the inadequacy, foreignness, and/or deviance of people of color exist. Institutions inflict racial microaggressions because people of color are not in positions of power where they can implement policies and programs that can make institutions less hostile places and can reduce the incidence and effects of interpersonal microaggressions. In this view, white dominance creates the conditions under which racial microaggressions can occur.
- As discussed above, racial microaggressions are defined in such a way that they include egregious acts (like calling someone a racial slur) and criminal acts (like punching someone because he is a racial minority). It seems intuitive that we lose something by calling these acts
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Chapter 6 The Legal Construction of Race 123 37 results (showing 5 best matches)
- López contends that law no longer constructs race through coercion—compelling individuals to occupy racial categories. Instead, he argues, law constructs race through ideology—creating a world where the racial ideas that we have “make sense.” So, for example, we have ideas about black criminality. And then, CRT argues, the criminal justice system comes along and legitimizes those ideas by vigorously policing black men and incarcerating them at historically high levels. We have ideas about Muslim terrorists. And then, CRT argues, the state comes along and legitimates those ideas by targeting Muslim communities for extensive counterterrorism surveillance—all the while refusing to call the violence perpetrated by non-Muslim individuals “terrorism.” We have ideas about Latinx illegality. And then, CRT argues, the state comes along and legitimates those ideas by erecting massive bureaucracies to identify undocumented Latinx immigrants while largely overlooking undocumented immigration...
- López’s reference to “morphology and ancestry” refers to race having always had a physical component. That is, race is corporeal—it pertains to the physical body—in the sense that inherited physical characteristics (i.e., the shapes and sizes of noses, lips, and eyes; the curl pattern of hair; the color of skin) have always been taken to denote the boundaries and content of racial categories. But, López warns, to say that inherited physical characteristics are the stuff of race should not be taken as an assertion that “features and lineage themselves are a function of racial variation.” Instead, inherited physical characteristics have racial significance “because society has invested these with racial meanings.” ...characteristics of the black race not because those features “naturally” correspond to this racial group. Instead, wide noses, thick lips, and dark skin are characteristics of the black race because we, as a society, have decided that we are going to categorize people...
- This chapter argues that we ought to pay attention to the laws, policies, and other processes that construct racial identities. What laws, policies, and processes, if any, have helped to construct the racial identities that would identify as, or ally themselves with, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan?
- Accordingly, a gene that traces to the Arab Peninsula may be found in the descendant of a Somali (who, according to popular racial logic, is usually identified as a black person) and in the descendant of a Saudi (who, according to popular racial logic, is usually Accordingly, a gene that traces to Turkey may be found in the descendant of a Russian person (who is likely to be identified as white) and in the descendant of a Chinese person (who is likely to be identified as Asian). In short, geographic ancestry, say adherents of the notion that race is a social construction, does not prove the biological or genetic coherence of the racial groups that exist in our racial schemas.
- Biological race devotees may respond by observing that there are variations in the rates by which racial groups possess certain genes. For example, black people may be twice as likely to possess a gene as, say, white or Asian people. The conclusion that may be drawn from this observation is that it makes sense to define biological race as these statistically significant variations in the rates by which racial groups possess certain genes. However, persons committed to the idea that race is a social construction respond by pointing out that
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Chapter 10 White Privilege 195 35 results (showing 5 best matches)
- We see this sentiment expressed in the debate over race-based affirmative action, with opponents arguing that the white people who are put at a competitive disadvantage by these programs enjoy no racial benefits from their racial identities. Opponents deny that white people should be “asked to bear the costs of social justice programs to improve the standing of minorities,” as they deny that we can comfortably assume that white people today, as a general matter, enjoy “the benefits of white privilege that put minorities at a relative disadvantage.” To be told that one must bear the burden of racial remediation because one is
- Moreover, the critique that white privilege does not exist sometimes expands into the claim that nonwhite people are not burdened with disadvantages on account of their race. Consider the millions of people who constitute the black middle-class. These folks are not stuck in hypersegregated ghettoes. They are not incarcerated. They are not trying to get decent educations in underfunded school districts. Quite the opposite, they live lives that are quite comfortable. Their class privilege appears to have saved them from the harmful effects that their supposed lack of racial privilege is supposed to cause. Some might go so far as to say that their class privilege has changed the meaning of their race. This critique takes seriously the possibility that class may “morph or elide racial identity.” ...change what race means, then “black” may not be an unprivileged racial status. That is, it may be wrong for theorists, scholars, commentators, and laypeople to speak of “black” as always...racial
- If you do think that black, Latinx, and indigenous persons are fairly described as having racial privilege in the context of race-based affirmative action programs, can you identify other scenarios where these groups have racial privilege?
- Part of the justification that the Court offered for its holding was the concern that if the plaintiff’s challenge to the death penalty was legitimate, other challenges to the criminal justice system, more broadly, would also be legitimate. It argued, “[I]f we accepted McCleskey’s claim that racial bias has impermissibly tainted the capital sentencing decision, we could soon be faced with similar claims as to other types of penalty . . . . [T]he claim that his sentence rests on the irrelevant factor of race easily could be extended to apply to claims based on unexplained discrepancies that correlate to membership in other minority groups, , in which it held that a showing that a law has a disparate impact on racial minorities was insufficient to establish a presumption of a constitutional violation, requiring instead that there be a showing that lawmakers intended to discriminate when they passed the burdensome law.
- Some have proposed that the general tendency exhibited by white people not to think of themselves in racial terms is an example of white privilege. The idea is that nonwhite people are much more likely than white people to describe themselves by reference to their racial identities. Further, people of color are much more likely to about their racial identities over the course of the day. While a woman of color may wonder whether her race informed a stranger’s failure to hold open a door for her, it is unlikely that a white woman will ask herself the same question. Scholars describe this as a benefit that white people possess: they enjoy “a feeling of racelessness or invisibility.”
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Chapter 15 The Intersection of Race and Disability 301 18 results (showing 5 best matches)
- That CRT and Disability Studies have some important commitments in common should not be taken to suggest that the two theoretical perspectives have never been in tension with one another. One point of conflict has arisen in CRT’s wholesale rejection of discourses and narratives that portray people of color as physically and mentally deficient—that is, disabled—and, thus, justifiably subordinated. As Part III.A. of this chapter explores, those interested in affirming the superiority of white people, in the past and at present, have described people of color as physically and mentally inferior to their white counterparts. In these narratives, white people represent the norm from which people of color deviate. Advocates for racial justice have tended to respond to these narratives by denying that racial minorities are deviants in this way. These advocates have argued that people of color are worthy of citizenship—they are deserving of participation in the body politic—because they are,...
- Theorists argue that paying attention to disability while studying race, and race while studying disability, reveals that, throughout history, the two have informed one another. To put it differently, society has taken the fact of racial otherness to be a sign of mental or physical deficiency; at the same time, it has taken mental or physical deficiency to be a sign of racial otherness.
- These numbers might represent the racialization of disability in modern times. Unlike the days of yore, during which racial minorities were to be impaired, the racialization of disability in the contemporary era occurs when racial minorities actually
- What do you think of Paul-Emile’s argument? What aspects of race or racial inequality does thinking of blackness as a disability illuminate? What aspects of race or racial inequality does thinking of blackness as a disability obscure? What are the benefits of this
- In contemporary times, arguments that we can presume that some racial groups, on account of their racial difference, are disabled do not really appear in public discourse. Disability is no longer racialized in the manner. Instead, in present times, disability might be racialized in the sense that the burdens associated with racial minority status might generate impairments that are the stuff of disability. For example, Mollow writes that “the production of some
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Chapter 14 The Intersection of Race and Religion 275 33 results (showing 5 best matches)
- has become a racial category in the U.S., we ought to pay attention to the work that our existing racial schemas play in this process. That is, the U.S. is a nation wherein the concept of race is not a foreign idea with very little social salience. Quite the opposite, there are strong arguments to be made—and critical race theorists make them all the time!—that the country is organized (politically, economically, socially, culturally) around race. If this is true, then we ought not to be surprised that religious differences have been assimilated into our existing racial understandings. In other words, it ought to be expected that we may come to understand any difference—in the immediate case, religious difference—in racial terms. As Jamal explains, “[I]n a society that is already constructed along racial lines, any perceived . . . ‘Other’ tends to conform to racism’s framework. This ‘othering’ process lends itself to the ...oneself vis-à-vis other groups along the lines of racial...
- As noted above, many in the U.S. who advocate on behalf of Muslims and Jews have conceptualized the discrimination these groups endure as a type of religious persecution, and not as a species of racism. Love has argued that the reason many advocates have made this conceptual choice is that in the U.S., it is much less provocative to fight “religious discrimination” than it is to fight “racism.” He writes, “Religious communities enjoy a great deal of respect and legitimacy in the United States, and standing up for religious freedom is almost never controversial (unlike standing up for racial justice).” oppression is an argument that is more likely to win than claiming that this treatment is a variety of racial oppression.
- the very same racial understandings that promulgated the “one-drop rule”—that any African ancestry demanded Black as the primary identity—which denied the vast ethnic and cultural diversity among Black Americans. The same racial processes reduced countless cultures and nations down to “Indian,” which helped to justify the brutal ethnic cleansing of Native Americans. The very same racist logic underpinned the Asian Exclusion Acts that affected Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and dozens of other communities—it was because of race that these endlessly diverse communities were viewed by most Americans as one and the same. On precisely the same line, the racial formation of the Middle Eastern racial identity collapses the myriad ethnic and religious groups among Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian Americans. Afghan, Armenian, Berber, Chaldean, Druze, Egyptian, Lebanese, Moroccan, Persian, Palestinian, Punjabi, Sikh, Turk, Turkmen, Yemeni—all these groups and many more are denied their self-...
- As the chapter observes, there may be a racial category of that purports to refer to Muslims and people who might be mistaken for Muslim. As Love writes, “[W]hen most Americans today use the term ‘Muslim’ in conversation, they are probably not really talking about Muslims. Instead, they are calling up this longstanding racial category, one that haphazardly includes hundreds of ethnic groups containing both Muslims and non-Muslims.” Moreover, as the chapter observes, the racial category of Muslims, as black Muslims tend not to be indicated by this term. Accordingly, the racial category of
- Do you believe that thinkers should continue to try to craft a racial designation for the group of people that the racialized category of indexes? Why or why not? What are the dangers involved in failing to craft this racial designation? What are the dangers involved in succeeding?
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Chapter 1 The Origins of Critical Race Theory 21 20 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Or do you think they did nothing more than replicate the discourses that racial justice activists had fought—discourses that avow that you can know a person’s qualifications by knowing his race?
- On the one hand, those who would come to found CRT were disappointed with the fact that the consortium of critical thinkers of the day, the Critical Legal Studies movement (or CLS), seemed uninterested in thinking about questions of race, racism, and racial justice. The adherents of CLS—or crits, as they came to be called—were a largely white, predominately male “collection of neo-Marxist intellectuals, former New Left activists, ex-counter-culturalists, and other varieties of oppositionists in law schools.” However, on the whole, they did not use these tools to think about racial hierarchy and subordination. CRT ought to be understood as a reaction to CLS’s perceived bankruptcy in this regard.
- “better argument.” In this narrative, law schools diversified when exceptional candidates of color miraculously presented and proved themselves worthy. Sustained and heated political activism was merely incidental or detrimental to the process. As critical race scholars, we should be wary of histories of our inclusion that perpetuate the myth of institutional openness to racial justice.
- Professor Derrick Bell was not only the first black tenured professor at HLS, but he was also one of the first legal scholars to be critical of the court victories that civil rights lawyers had secured in the 1950s and 1960s—victories that had brought formal racial equality to the country. While most of his contemporaries wrote with a certain satisfaction about all of the gains that people of color had achieved as a result of the Civil Rights Movement, Bell was less sanguine. In his scholarship and teaching, he sought to disturb many of the racial truisms that had come to be accepted. Bell challenged the assumption that the litigation strategies adopted by civil rights lawyers actually reflected the desires and needs of the marginalized people that the lawyers purported to represent. He disputed the belief that the grant of civil rights to people of color solely (or, even, mostly) benefited people of color. And he contested the proposition that society was well on its way to...
- Thus, the emergent critical race theorists were not interested in engaging in critique in order to see who could generate the fanciest theory. Instead, they were interested in engaging in critique in order to end racial subordination. If they were going to expose the indeterminacy, incoherence, and contradictory nature of the law, they were going to do it with the goal of dismantling existing racial hierarchies. They were going to do it with the emancipation of people of color on their minds.
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Chapter 12 Intersectionality 233 6 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Crenshaw recognized that this phenomenon of courts schizophrenically perceiving black women to be too distinct, yet not distinct enough, from their black male and white female counterparts mirrored the schizophrenia that was taking place among social justice organizations that were agitating for racial and gender justice. She writes that among these groups, “Black women are regarded either as too much like women or Blacks and the compounded nature of their experience is absorbed into the collective experiences of either group or as too different, in which case Black women’s Blackness or femaleness sometimes has placed their needs and perspectives at the margin of the feminist and Black liberationist agendas.”
- black men, because of their gender, are usually imagined to be privileged vis-à-vis black women. However, consider the criminal justice system and mass incarceration. While black women are overrepresented among those who are under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system (i.e., in jail or prison, or on probation or parole), black men nevertheless outstrip them in this respect. Moreover, many would argue that gender—specifically, ideas about black masculinity—informs the overrepresentation of black men within the criminal justice system. That is, black men’s makes them vulnerable to the excesses of the criminal justice system. In this way—and in this specific social context— , when it intersects with race unprivilege, may be an unprivileged position vis-à-vis femaleness. With respect to the muscular criminal justice system, femaleness—black, white, and other—may constitute the privileged side of the binary.
- He notes, though, that throughout history and continuing into the present, black males’ heterosexuality has been understood as a threat to white women; as such, gay black males’ homosexuality has rendered them “safer” than their straight counterparts, saving them from some of the violence, like lynching, committed against the latter. Hutchinson observes, “Thus, heterosexual status, typically a privileged category, has served as a source of racial subjugation. This history complicates the apparent stability of privileged and subordinate categories; the meanings of these identity categories are, instead, contextual and shifting.”
- African Americans and the Criminal Justice System
- Racial Ethnic Women’s Labor: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Class Oppression
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Chapter 7 Structural/Institutional Racism 147 18 results (showing 5 best matches)
- First, most definitions include a lack of intentionality. Most scholars posit that the laws, policies, procedures, and programs that function to produce racial inequality—specifically, a racial hierarchy in which white people, as a group, are doing much better than nonwhite groups—do not have racial subordination as their purpose or design. These scholars note that intentionality characterized the initial construction of the racial hierarchy. Certainly, actors However, most definitions of institutional/structural racism propose that sustaining the racial hierarchy that was intentionally constructed and maintained during the pre-civil rights era is now the unintended, if not unforeseeable, consequence of contemporary laws, policies, procedures, and programs.
- Second, most definitions include an element of banality. That is, the practices that sustain racial inequality are not spectacular. Quite the contrary, they are daily, prosaic, mundane, ordinary. As Daria Roithmayr has written, racial gaps “are produced by the
- Third, most definitions include an element of race neutrality—the absence of any explicit invocation of race. The idea is that the things that sustain racial inequality are myriad, and the most consequential of them reproduce racial hierarchies without mentioning race at all.
- Referring to “racism” aims to evoke a sense of moral repugnance and social duty by vivifying the fundamental injustice of entrenched racial inequalities. . . . To call current racial patterns “racism” is to make a claim on that national moral obligation; in contrast, to relinquish the notion of racism, and even of race, is to cede one’s claim on the nation’s conscience.
- , the Court embraced the discriminatory intent standard, which requires that persons challenging a law that has the effect of disadvantaging a racial group prove that the architects of the law to disadvantage the aggrieved racial group when they passed the law. In accepting the discriminatory intent standard, the Court rejected the disparate impact standard, which would only necessitate a finding that the law has the effect of harming a racial group. Part of the reason for the Court’s rejection of the disparate impact standard was the concern that it would have made a large number of laws and policies constitutionally suspect. The Court wrote:
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Table of Contents 11 results (showing 5 best matches)
Summary of Contents 4 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.
