Critical Race Theory - History and Reality

 If you do not like kids being taught there was slavery in America, then I suggest you move to Russia. If you cannot acknowledge that Americans have been racist, the same suggestion goes for you. Certainly, do not read any further. We have been racists, we have been genocidal; those are the facts. We have also listened to what Mr. Lincoln called our better angels. Wanting only to hear about our better angels neuters them, removes them from the context where they were needed. Frankly, I cannot teach about our better angels without also teaching of our evil ones, but there is no telling how often we can delude ourselves. (I am a living example of that). It is overcoming those demons which has made America great.

Now, if you are wanting to diminish your ignorance, please read the following and follow the links back to their originals.

On the Importance of Critical Race Theory—and the Delusional Attacks On It:

LH: After several decades of gradual development in law, Critical Race Theory has started to make inroads in other disciples and countries.  What about the discipline has made it useful in areas outside US law?

VR: I think this is a complicated question about intellectual genealogies and cross pollination among scholars who study race and ethnicity. But the short answer is that good ideas, which critical race theory is full of, are useful across disciplines.

Critical race theory was formalized in legal studies but was interdisciplinary from the start. Kimberley Crenshaw, is clear about the contributions of African American studies to critical race theory. Similarly Delgado and Stefancic point to many influences, including European philosophers, Dr. King, and “Black Power and Chicano movements.”

I’m a sociologist with a joint appointment in African American Studies, disciplines that share some intellectual precursors with critical race theory. For instance, all three fields claim W.E.B. Du Bois as a leading, if not founding, figure. Du Bois is often credited, along with Boas and his students, with forwarding social constructionist perspectives on race in the early 20th century. Du Bois was also a structuralist who placed the genesis of racial inequality in social conditions rather than biological or cultural difference.

Social constructionist perspectives on race are part of critical race theory but also show up across the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. Social construction is now the paradigm. One way that this broad consensus gets discussed is the claim that critical race theory spread. But a different way to think about this process is that many disciplines concluded race is socially constructed because that’s what the data shows. Convergence around a correct idea is how knowledge production is supposed to work.

What critical race theorists did, and this is really comes through in Delgado and Stefancic’s book, is to formalize a set of broadly shared paradigms like structural racism, social construction, and intersectionality into a compelling overarching framework. Critical race theory coupled these areas of scholarly consensus with more controversial (but no less compelling) claims about the permanence of racism, doubts about linear progress, colorblind racism, and a version of standpoint epistemology that privileged the perspective of marginalized scholars. Creating this framework allowed other disciplines to take certain aspects and apply them to problems in their field.

In sociology, structural accounts of racism are common (despite some holdouts).”Race is a social construction” is a mantra so oft repeated that, as my colleague Deadric Williams points out, the implications of race being socially constructed are blunted by methods that continue to treat race as an immutable characteristic. But lots of sociologists who recognize structural racism aren’t critical race theorists.

You will need to pay to see The Long War on Black Studies by Robin D. G. Kelley, but the opening quotes are quite instructive.

Thank you for reading this.

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