Critical Race Theory: A Primer
Author:
Bridges, Khiara M.
Edition:
1st
Copyright Date:
2019
24 chapters
have results for racism
Chapter 2 The Conservatism of Liberal Discourse on Race 35 29 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.
- CRT proposes that this definition of racism is woefully inadequate. While defining racism as a “discrete, identifiable, intentional, irrational act perpetrated by a bad actor” describes a type of racism that may have been ubiquitous in the pre-civil rights era (and that may tenaciously persist today), CRT argues that it does not describe the mechanisms that do most of the work of maintaining white people as the dominant racial group in the country at present. CRT contends that far from being discrete, racism and racial dominance are oftentimes the result of the interactions of many institutions across multiple domains. CRT claims that far from being easily identifiable, racism (and the recognition of an act or omission as a species thereof) frequently requires a theoretical framework to help us ascertain which societal choices inflict racial subordination and, consequently, ought to be designated as racism. CRT proposes that racism is not invariably intentional; in the post-civil...
- However, the dichotomy between individual racism and institutional racism may be a false one. Institutions may play an important role in creating and legitimating individual racism, and individuals may play an important role in producing institutional racism. While the latter point may be easy to grasp—individuals create and administer institutions, after all—the former may be a bit
- As noted above, liberals have tended to define racism in terms of individual bias and prejudice. According to this definition, racism is what happens when a racist individual externalizes his deeply-felt bias and prejudice. On the contrary, CRT tends to understand racism in terms of institutions and structures. According to this definition, racism is what happens when a racist individual externalizes his deeply-felt bias and prejudice,
- What this example illustrates is that individual and institutional racism are not perfectly dichotomous. As such, we might need to challenge formulations of individual racism that are overly individualizing. Conceptions of individual racism at present tend to disconnect the harborers of racist sentiment from the structures that make the sentiment “make sense.” A more promising conception might be to understand individual racism to be far from a character flaw, but rather a belief system that undergoes constant reality testing. To the extent that there is obvious and undeniable racial stratification and inequality, then we might individual racism. Such beliefs should only be unexpected when we have created a world in which there are no external data that could be used to give them validity—when we have dismantled the institutions that produce a society that gives those beliefs some degree of rationality and believability.
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Chapter 7 Structural/Institutional Racism 147 28 results (showing 5 best matches)
- 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
- Political activist Stokely Carmichael and sociologist Charles Hamilton usually are credited with coining the term “institutional racism.” In their 1967 tome, , they distinguished individual acts of racism from a racism that was more covert and subtle. They wrote:
- 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.
- Social psychologists Michael Unzueta and Brian Lowery conducted a study that sought to shed some light on why some white people are willing to recognize institutional/structural racism as racism and others are not. They began by noting that the concept of institutional/structural racism presupposes that people of color not only are unfairly disadvantaged by race neutral processes, policies, and procedures, but that white people are unfairly by the same. For example, while funding public schools through property taxes disadvantages children of color in poor neighborhoods, the practice actually benefits children in wealthier neighborhoods, who are disproportionately white. Therefore, if the way that we finance our public school is a species of institutional/structural racism, it is a racism that works to benefit white people as it harms people of color.
- When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of society. But when in that same city—Birmingham, Alabama—five hundred black babies die each year because of the lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities . . . that is a function of institutional racism.
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Introduction 1 13 results (showing 5 best matches)
- explanations tend to define racism as discrete, identifiable, intentional, irrational acts perpetrated by bad individuals. These accounts diagnose the racist’s error as thinking about race, and they go on to conclude that this is what racism is: racism is what happens when we think about race. Accordingly, it posits that racism will stop happening when we stop thinking about race. Here, we arrive again at Chief Justice Roberts’s maxim that “[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” We see, then, that implicit in the definition of racism as “thinking about race” is a commitment to colorblindness.
- CRT rejects traditional liberal understandings of the problem of racism and how racism will be defeated.
- There are two additional reasons for CRT’s refusal to define racism as “being conscious of race” and as “people who are race conscious.” First, if racism is what happens when you are conscious of race, then efforts to address racial inequality that require consciousness of race become the stuff of racism. Such efforts include affirmative action programs that allow admissions offices to be aware of the race of the applicant, initiatives to desegregate schools that ...of racial minorities that consider the racial composition of neighborhoods when crafting voting districts, and many more. Because all of these practices involve being conscious of race, they are “racist,” according to the definition of racism that CRT rejects. Moreover, if they are racist, then their supporters have to apologize for them—citing them as temporary departures from the norm of colorblindness. They have to be conceptualized as necessary evils. CRT contends that there is no need to apologize for... ..., racism...
- Second, CRT believes that defining racism as race consciousness is problematic because it narrows our field of vision. If racism is defined as irrational bad acts perpetrated by bad actors, then it disallows us from seeing all the other social practices that may also function to maintain racial inequality—like residential segregation, the financing of public schools through property taxes, the way that we have instituted the social safety net, etc.
- It claims that we are closer to that utopic racial destination than we are to our dystopic racial origins, where race brutally determined the content and trajectory of individuals’ lives. Post-racialism denies that the nation today is in any important way proximate to its historical past. It argues instead that, at present, racism is an aberration, a rarity. It posits that enduring racial inequality is not the effect of race or racism, but rather is the effect of other forces, like class or individual behavior.
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Chapter 8 Implicit Bias 157 11 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Lawrence’s first regret is at the heart of the progressive critique of implicit bias research. Lawrence has observed that his article, and the field of implicit social cognition more generally, is focused on the individual and the prejudices and aversions that he may or may not possess. Note how this focus is apiece with traditional understandings of racism, which posit that racism is what happens when racist individuals think racist thoughts and then do racist things. As discussed in Chapter 7, progressive theorists of race and racial inequality have fought tooth and nail to challenge this narrow formulation of racism, positing instead that in the post-civil rights era, racism is better defined as what happens when institutions and structures operate in a race neutral manner that nevertheless perpetuates historical racial disadvantage and produces new forms of racial disenfranchisement. However, implicit bias research remains squarely in an individual-centered paradigm—a framework
- The Aversive Form of Racism
- Individualizing Racism
- Almost a decade before the IAT was developed, psychologists John Dovidio and Samuel Gaertner developed the theory of “aversive racism.” The theory proposes that people, born into a social milieu that links racial minorities with negative traits and characteristics, absorb these stereotypes early on in their life courses. However, society also expresses commitment to egalitarian principles that propose the equality and humanity of all individuals and that declare that discrimination and prejudice are wrong. The negative associations that individuals harbor conflict with these egalitarian principles. Aversive racism is the consequence of this conflict. Dovidio and his co-authors explain,
- While people who were already convinced of the prevalence of anti-black racism embraced the theory of aversive racism, it was not until more “technical” explanations of implicit bias were developed that the concept really gained traction in the literature. That is, it was not until we could refer to it as the
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Chapter 20 Education 437 5 results
- Critical race theorists have taken inequities in school funding quite hard. Writes Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Perhaps no area of schooling underscores inequity and racism better than school funding. CRT argues that inequality in school funding is a function of institutional and structural racism. . . . Without suffering a single act of personal racism, most African Americans suffer the consequences of systemic and structural racism.”
- race and racism
- distinction—and the proposition that the Constitution does not tolerate the former, but completely countenances the latter—has been the target of critical thinkers’ ire insofar as it, in their view, “obscures and diminishes the significance and complexity of race, racism (structural inequality), and the present day effects of past discrimination.”
- poverty in conjunction with the condition of their schools and schooling is institutional and structural racism.”
- ignored the reality that housing discrimination and the country’s history of racial disenfranchisement—which have caused black people to be poorer than their white counterparts—made it exceedingly difficult for many black families to move to the suburbs. Residential segregation, with people of color confined to urban centers and white people living in the outlying suburbs, is not the result of voluntary housing choices. Instead, they argued, it is the product of past and present racism. No matter, said
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Chapter 14 The Intersection of Race and Religion 275 25 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Once we are satisfied that we know what race is, we have to ask about the content of racism. Indeed, what is racism?
- French philosopher Etienne Balibar’s description of “differentialist racism” has influenced many scholars who contend that Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are fittingly understood as racism. Balibar has written that in our contemporary world, wherein ideas about biological race do not have as much believability as they did in previous eras, the certainty that some groups ought to be eliminated from the nation—or, if their presence there is inevitable, subjugated within the nation—can no longer be based on the conviction that the now does this work. He maintains that racism presently takes the form of “differentialist racism,” wherein culture “function[s] like a nature.” ...Harlingue, and Alvin Ka Hin Wong elaborate that the “work of differentialist racism is to construct essential cultural difference; to mark cultural distinctions as homogeneous, static, and embedded; to install boundaries between cultures; and to reproduce and represent a hierarchy of cultures based on the...
- Within differentialist racism, ideas about the “insurmountability” of cultural dissimilarities suggest the “harmfulness of abolishing frontiers” and the “incompatibility of life-styles and traditions.” parcel of the American ethos, cultures that are not committed to the formal equality of all persons, or cultures that are thought to expect persons to dogmatically obey authority figures all emerge as threats to the nation inasmuch as they have fundamentally un-American norms, principles, and ethics. Within differentialist racism, some groups are inferior to “us” not because of the genes they possess, but rather because of the beliefs that their cultures lead them to possess. Differentialist racism proposes that we do not need ideas about natural, pre-social biological differences between groups to construct some groups as inevitably and fundamentally dissimilar from “us” and appropriately excluded from the nation—or “the West,” more generally—as a consequence thereof.
- Islamophobia and Racism
- Was Mohammed a victim of racism? Religious animus? Both? Neither?
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Chapter 19 The Welfare State 407 9 results (showing 5 best matches)
- of racism. Insofar as TANF functions to keep poor people, who are disproportionately people of color, in poverty, it “creates its own theater of racial degradation. Du Bois thought that if the freedmen had been allowed to live differently, then the racism of Philadelphians, and of Americans generally, would have faded. If the minority poor were allowed to live differently now, then contemporary racism might also fade.”
- remedy the effects of racism?”) Or do you believe that it is better to make arguments that ignore both the reality that some races may need the welfare state more than others as well as the reasons for this being true?
- Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty
- Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class
- Kenneth J. Neubeck & Noel A. Cazenave, Welfare Racism: Playing the Race Card Against America’s Poor
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Chapter 12 Intersectionality 233 11 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Additionally, proponents of intersectionality have worries that the dissolution of categories will not necessarily be simultaneous with the dissolution of the racism and sexism that have erased black women from feminist and antiracist movements, respectively. That is, simply because anti-essentialist organizations are agitating around ...essentialist organizations might agitate around the issue of Medicaid funding for abortion as opposed to the category of low-income women of color (who are disproportionately burdened by the refusal to fund abortion services with Medicaid funds)—this does not mean that their agendas, political strategies, or leadership structure will not reflect racism (or heteronormativity, or islamophobia, or xenophobia, etc.). As Cho and Westley explain, “[T]he proposed alternative of ‘getting beyond identity politics’ and moving toward ‘radical and plural democracies’ based on ‘interests,’ as a step up in the evolution of political group formations, begs the...
- Racism constitutes the sexism and poverty that the poor black woman confronts at the same time that sexism constitutes the racism and poverty that she confronts at the same time that poverty constitutes the sexism and racism that she confronts. Within this alternative understanding, there is no way to theorize racism separate from sexism and poverty. As such, there is no way to add them together in order to analyze any multiply-subordinated individual’s or group’s experiences in society.
- What this means in practical terms is that the subordination experienced by the black women that Crenshaw centered in her early theorizations of intersectionality is not white women’s subordination plus black men’s subordination. Rather, when sexism and racism combine, the result is an oppression that is wholly distinct from the sexism that white women encounter and the racism that black men encounter. To propose a (bad) analogy: it is less cooking and more chemistry. That is, the additive approach that defenders of intersectionality reject would imagine black women’s subordination to be : the combination of the vegetables of racism and the broth of sexism. The constitutive approach that defenders embrace would understand black women’s subordination to be : the synergistic result of the interaction of the two hydrogen atoms of racism and the oxygen atom of sexism.
- —has no easy solution. And the stakes are high. As Crenshaw explained in her first article on intersectionality, the failure of anti-racist activists and scholars to consider the sexist aspects of racism led them to offer an incomplete rendering of racism. Similarly, she explained that the failure of white feminists to consider the racist aspects of sexism led them to offer an incomplete rendering of sexism. Ignoring axes by which power subordinates and privileges individuals led anti-racist thinkers and feminists to present “distorted analysis of racism and sexism.” ...then the failure to analyze an axis along which individuals are subordinated and privileged because it appears to be irrelevant to an investigation will lead to distortions. Thus, the investigator of Medicaid-reliant women receiving prenatal care in a public hospital in the U.S. will offer a distorted analysis of racism and sexism if she fails to consider how cisnormativity and the othering of non-Christian...
- 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 13 The Intersection of Race and Sexuality 253 9 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Some scholars have observed that because LGBTQ persons of color have to negotiate racism in addition to homophobia, their ideas about liberation from the oppressions they face may differ from individuals and groups that only have to face racism (because they are straight and a racial minority) or homophobia (because they are white and a sexual minority).
- . Many of these organizations have failed to recognize that homophobia and cisnormativity must be challenged if racism and racial disenfranchisement are to be defeated. Hutchinson points to the AIDS crisis as a powerful example of the heteronormativity of most antiracist advocacy. He writes, “Despite the devastation of AIDS within communities of color, anti-racist political organizations have largely ignored this issue, due to . . . a false ‘belief’ that the issues presented by AIDS lie outside the scope of ‘traditional’ anti-racist politics. . . . [I]ssues [of] equal access to health care and to preventative health counseling for persons of color . . . are squarely within traditional anti-racist politics. Only a heteronormative construction of anti-racism could define AIDS and HIV-related health care issues as
- It is important to note that the comparison between anti-black racism and discrimination against LGBTQ persons might be attractive if one has one’s eye on the courts. That is, arguing that homophobic discrimination is anti-black racism, and contending that LGBTQ people presently are in a situation that is similar to the one in which black people found themselves during the days of formal segregation, might make sense in terms of litigation strategy. The Court long ago decided that it will use strict scrutiny to review laws that discriminate on the basis of race, making it extremely unlikely that such laws will survive challenge. If discrimination against LGBTQ persons is, indeed, like racial discrimination, then it, too, should be reviewed with the most rigorous scrutiny; and it, too, should be illegal in most cases. Thus, if the goal is the achievement
- . Investigations of this type might, for example, interrogate how race and racism have been sexualized—as when white lynch mobs castrated their black male victims in the course of killing them. Or they might explore how pundits in the nineteenth century once argued that immigration from Mexico ought to be restricted because Mexican “greasers” posed a sexual threat to U.S.-born white women. Analyses in this genre explore the intersection of race and sexuality on the
- 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:
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Chapter 16 Health 319 6 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Some studies dispute whether “John Henryism” can explain elevated morbidity and mortality among people of color. One study shows that when individuals perceived racism on their jobs and directly challenged it, they had lower systolic blood pressure measurements than those who either had no reactions to perceived racism or who suppressed those reactions. Ford et al., note 40, at S137. “John Henryism” would suggest the opposite result; it would predict that those who attempted to overcome racism by challenging it would have higher blood pressures.
- A source of stress around which there is more disagreement is racism—something with which racial minorities of all socioeconomic statuses have to contend, according to progressive race scholars. They argue that even wealthier people of color have to experience the physiological, emotional, and psychological responses to individual acts of racism, i.e., being racially profiled by the police, followed around stores while shopping, passed over for employment opportunities, promotions, and raises, and assumed to be the undeserving beneficiaries of affirmative action programs in the educational institutions that they attend and at the jobs that they secure. They also have to experience the physiological, emotional, and psychological responses to institutional/structural racism, which Chapter 7 defines and explores. Researchers in this vein argue that racism is a race-specific stress—something that white people, as a general matter, do not have to encounter regularly or at all. Moreover,...
- between the U.S.’s high spending on health care and the low levels of health of its population involve race and racism. Indeed, many progressive thinkers are interested in how race and racism may explain the U.S.’s status as the sickest among the wealthiest nations.
- problem. And if class is actually the mechanism that leads to racial disparities in health, then progressive race scholars may be barking up the wrong tree when they seek to investigate the ostensible effects that race and racism have on nonwhite people’s health statuses.
- Perceived Everyday Racism, Residential Segregation, and HIV Testing Among Patients at a Sexually Transmitted Disease Clinic
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Index 473 29 results (showing 5 best matches)
Chapter 9 Racial Microaggressions 181 4 results
- Pierce asserted that in the post-civil rights era, people of color are much more likely to encounter racial microaggressions than they are to encounter the more spectacular, wholly unambiguous demonstrations of racism that characterized the days of formal racial inequality. He wrote that, in modern times, scholars of racism “must not look for the gross and obvious. The subtle, cumulative mini-assault is the substance of today’s racism.”
- 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:
- Essentially, scholars in the field argue that any theory of racial inequality in the present is incomplete if it does not consider microaggressions. Writes Solórzano and coauthors, “Ultimately, theories about structural/institutional racism and racist ideology/attitudes provide at best only partial explanations for persistent social hierarchy and inequitable outcomes by race in contemporary America. Interpersonal relationships between human actors combine with structural patterns and ideological perspectives to reproduce racial hierarchy.”
- ...reacted and deliberating over whether he ought to have confronted the professor. He may also have to deal with the anger and frustration of being told that he is being paranoid or that he is overreacting to an insignificant slight. Sue specifically observes that it is not unusual for people of color and white people to reach different conclusions about whether a microaggressive incident was, in fact, racially motivated. According to Sue, white people’s relative lack of experience with racial hostility may make it difficult for them to agree with people of color when the latter assert that race motivated a particular event or interaction. Even more disempowering to people of color, observes Sue, is that white people’s perceptions usually “win.” He writes, “Microaggressions inevitably produce a clash of racial realities where the experiences of racism by Blacks are pitted against the views of Whites who hold the power to define the situation in nonracial terms. The power to define...
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- Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism And The Persistence of Racial Inequality in America
- Derrick Bell, Racism is Here to Stay: Now What?, 35 How. L.J. 79, 87 (1991)
- 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.
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Chapter 4 The LatCrit Intervention 83 9 results (showing 5 best matches)
- While the myopia that the black-white paradigm induces is offensive because it erases the histories and present realities of all nonblack racial minorities in the country, it is also damaging because it results in an incomplete understanding of racism. The black-white paradigm leads to the conclusion that the mechanisms that have subordinated black people in the U.S. constitute the entire universe of techniques of racial exclusion. Thus, the black-white paradigm leads us to suppose that racism is anti-black institutions, laws, and practices: chattel slavery, Jim Crow laws, vagrancy statutes, convict leasing systems, poll taxes, literacy tests, redlined neighborhoods, mass incarceration, etc. This limited paradigm disallows us from seeing the mechanisms that have oppressed Asian, indigenous, and Latinx peoples throughout history. As Leslie Espinosa has written, racism is ...as racism—is important because it allows us to recognize the multiplicity of practices that have...
- peoples of color, though in different ways, still the political impact of uncritically abandoning the Black/White paradigm would be indefensibly regressive. . . . If LatCrit theory were to abandon uncritically the Black/White paradigm, it would marginalize a substantial portion of the Latina/o community and betray our aspirations to substantive intergroup justice. Thus, the objective must be to move our understanding of white supremacy progressively beyond the Black/White binary of race, even as we acknowledge the particular and virulent forms of anti-Black racism that are institutionalized and expressed in virtually every society across the globe, including Latina/o communities. Doing so requires that we center the particularities of Black subordination long enough to recognize the way anti-Black racism operates in Latina/o communities and the way the struggles of Black peoples, who are not Latina/o, are also implicated in the LatCrit project.
- What do you think of this defense of the black-white paradigm? Do we need the black-white paradigm in order to acknowledge “the particular and virulent forms of anti-Black racism that are institutionalized and expressed in virtually every society across the globe”? Is this acknowledgement important? Why or why not?
- 39 (2005). Here, Gilroy argues that race does not produce racism; instead racism produces race. Following this sentiment, CRT and LatCrit would look to see whether some need for subordination has produced a group as a race. The theories would conclude that because there has been a need to subordinate Latinx people, they have been created as a race.
- LatCrit problematizes this result, arguing that it functions to subordinate nonblack minorities, to exclude these same groups from the polity, and to maintain the U.S. as a white nation. As Matsuda has observed, employers’ refusals to hire those who speak accented English, together with “[t]he recent push for English-only laws[ ] and the attack on bilingual education, may represent new outlets for racial anxiety now that many traditional outlets are denied. The angry insistence that ‘they’ should speak English [or speak English without an accent] serves as a proxy for a whole range of fears displaced by the social opprobrium directed at explicit racism.” LatCrit proposes that just as the explicit racism of yesteryear maintained the U.S. as a white nation, the modern techniques—operating in terms of language and accent prohibitions—do the same.
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Chapter 17 Affirmative Action 343 5 results
- Finally, some critical thinkers are skeptical about the possibility of a society in which race-thinking has disappeared. Derrick Bell, a father of CRT, once declared that “racism is here to stay.” If Bell is correct, then the argument that affirmative action delays the arrival of a society in which race-thinking has disappeared is specious: a society in which race-thinking has disappeared will never arrive, as “racism is here to stay.”
- Derrick Bell, Racism is Here to Stay: Now What?, 35 How. L.J. 79, 79 (1992)
- Critical supporters of race conscious hiring and admissions programs reject the proposition that these programs ought to be pursued as a prophylactic technique that staves off social instability and conflict. Rather, they argue that such programs ought to be pursued in light of the country’s history of racism and racial disenfranchisement. That is, critical supporters frame affirmative action as an effort to remedy the effects of past and present racial
- interests, preferences and commitments. For example, Lawrence proposes that, instead of defining merit as the list of achievements that affluent white men have valued historically, we might “re-imagine merit in light of [our] commitment to the goal of fighting racism.”
- Some have argued that institutions ought to replace race-based affirmative action with class-based affirmative action. They assert that race-talk is divisive, and to speak about racism and racial inequality is politically disadvantageous. These proponents of class-based affirmative action claim that class-conscious programs can get racial minorities admitted to institutions from which they have been historically excluded without having to use the “dirty” word of race. However, some critical observers are skeptical about class-based
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Chapter 1 The Origins of Critical Race Theory 21 7 results (showing 5 best matches)
- 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.”
- How do you feel about the students’ insistence that a black professor teach the course? Do you think they were right in wanting to learn from someone “who had not only acquired legal expertise in fighting racism but who had also experienced its dynamics individually and institutionally”?
- 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.”
- professor was “nothing more than blatant racism.”
- 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.”
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Chapter 3 Critiques of Critical Race Theory 57 8 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.
- as a child and as an adult. We know from the story that being forced to confront the reality that black people have been, and continue to be, viewed as minstrels caused Lawrence to develop a knot in his stomach, to panic, to feel shame, to want to disappear. But, although this subjective account allows us to know what encountering racism felt like , we are left not knowing whether encountering racism feels the same way to all people of color. Thus, the skeptic may privilege other forms of knowing, like statistics, that allow us to know
- ...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 step to a better world...
- ...easy to see why Matsuda’s argument raised a few hackles. The problem, in her critics’ view, is that it is inconsistent with what we observe on a day-to-day basis. They point out that we can observe the incredible heterogeneity of people of color at any given moment on any given day. We know that political conservative Clarence Thomas replaced political liberal Thurgood Marshall on the Court. We know that anywhere from 18% to 28% of Latinx persons voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election—despite his describing Mexican immigrants as “rapists,” “criminals,” and “bad hombres” and promising to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border if elected. Thus, even if Matsuda is correct that racism is an omnipresence in the U.S. and no person of color living in the country has managed to remain untouched by it—a proposition with which most, if not all, persons operating within the CRT paradigm would agree—it seems extremely unlikely that all people of color have responded to...
- , a slick and conventional magazine directed at an audience of black entrepreneurs, reveals that even economically successful black capitalists are critical of the Reagan Administration’s effect on the poor. There is something about color that doesn’t wash off as easily as class. The experience of racism, it seems, causes the normative choices of black capitalists to diverge from the choices of others in their class.
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Chapter 5 Other Crits 101 12 results (showing 5 best matches)
- operate to privilege some lives while constraining others; however, theorizing these queer lives would not provide insight into how racism and operate to privilege some lives while constraining others. This position would argue that ignoring queer people of color still allows theorists to produce a complete account of racism in the U.S. or anywhere else.
- 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, ...of the myriad forms that racial disadvantage takes—and, as such, to develop a total theory of race, racism, and racial inequality—one has to account...
- ...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 observes an analogue in the experiences of disabled persons of color. They are marginalized more than disabled white people (who are unprivileged by virtue of ability, but privileged by virtue of their race) and non-disabled people of color (who are unprivileged by virtue of race, but privileged by virtue of ability). Accordingly, disabled people of color have different experiences of ableism than disabled white people, and they have...
- This is, in large part, because Crenshaw first offered the theory to critique black women’s simultaneous erasure from feminist movements and movements against racism. Because intersectionality was introduced as a project to make women of color visible, it has come to be associated with women of color.
- on any basis. As such, to write within the QueerCrit framework means to center the lives of queer people of color—as varied as they are—in order to produce scholarship that challenges racism, classism, sexism, ableism, and xenophobia as vigorously as it challenges heteronormativity and cisnormativity.
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Chapter 10 White Privilege 195 7 results (showing 5 best matches)
- I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection.
- I can worry about racism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking.
- Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists
- Progressive race thinkers have argued that white privilege is no accident of history. Quite the opposite, they argue, the law has actively created it. In the pre-civil rights era, it did so through denying citizenship to nonwhite people, expropriating the lands on which indigenous people lived and relied, protecting the institution of chattel slavery, and assigning a denigrated legal status to black and other nonwhite people in the postbellum period. These thinkers contend that in the post-civil rights era, the law continues to create white privilege, albeit by different means. They assert that the law has constructed the distribution of wealth and opportunities that was the byproduct of the egregious, spectacular racism of the pre-civil rights era as the baseline. The law creates white privilege in the present day, argue critical thinkers of race, by conceptualizing efforts to redistribute these ill-gotten gains as presumptively unfair, immoral, and illegal.
- Instead of embracing a jurisprudence that allows the Constitution to reach and remedy what critical thinkers believe to be systemic racial privilege, the Court instead has embraced doctrine that makes unearned racial advantages and disadvantages legally irrelevant. It accomplishes this, say critical thinkers, through its definition of “discrimination,” which the Court understands as “explicitly articulated, intentional, conscious racism.”
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- This framing encourages us to consider how the phenomena that critical thinkers of race identify as instances of modern-day racism—i.e., mass incarceration, police violence, an inadequate safety net, residential segregation, the placement of environmental hazards in poor communities of color, and punitive immigration policies, to name a few—might manufacture impairments that become disabilities. This framing encourages us to think through how depression, schizophrenia, and a host of other mental illnesses might be products of the processes that progressive thinkers call institutional racism.
- framing of race and racism? What are the costs? Do you believe the costs outweigh the benefits?
- manage their impairment. Mollow observes that poverty and racism often create “insurmountable barriers” to the ability of poor people of color to access the medical care that more affluent white people have at their disposal. She notes that while disability activists have railed against the coercive treatments to which people with mental impairments have been subjected in the past, forced medication may actually be indicative of a privileged position. Mollow writes, “[F]or many African American women with depression, lack of access to health care, rather than involuntary administration of it, is the most oppressive aspect of the contemporary politics of mental illness.”
- The overrepresentation of students of color among the population of students with disabilities that impact educational performance is a thorny problem that is not likely to go away anytime soon. Critical scholars contend that the issue will not be resolved without theorizing race and disability simultaneously. As Annamma and her coauthors assert, “Neither institutional racism alone nor institutional ableism on its own can explain why students of color are more likely to be labeled with dis/abilities and segregated than their White peers with and without dis/abilities; instead, it is the two working together.”
- These theorists suggest that the acceptance within the academy of analyses of gender, sexuality, class and race has been matched by the rejection of analyses of disability—a suggestion that two other scholars make more explicit when they observe a “ ‘sharp contrast’ between the reception of disability studies . . . and that of ‘radical analyses of racism and sexism that quickly won favor.’ ”
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- Ian F. Haney López, Post-Racial Racism: Racial Stratification and Mass Incarceration in the Age of Obama, 98 Calif. L. Rev. 1023, 1048 (2010)
- control in the first instance. As Brewer and Heitzeg put it, “[T]he reliance on the criminal system provides the color-blind racist regime the perfect set of codes to describe racialized patterns of alleged crime and actual punishment without ever referring to race. . . . There is no discussion of race and racism; there is only public discourse about crime, criminals, gangs, and drug-infested neighborhoods.”
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- Publication Date: December 5th, 2018
- ISBN: 9781683284437
- Subject: Race and the Law
- Series: Concepts and Insights
- Type: Hornbook Treatises
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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.