What is Critical Race Theory?
If this were even five years ago, the above question wouldn’t be seen as politically charged. But today it is. And that in and of itself is a political tactic. One side says here are the solutions to racism. The other says racism doesn’t exist. Then you end up arguing about the existence and not the solutions. They’ve won without providing any solutions. It’s distasteful because it assumes you are too lazy and too stupid (honestly) to notice what they did. And there are people who think this is especially entertaining on television or social media. And there are those who think the mere mention of centuries of enslavement, holocaust, and genocide is more hurtful than being the descendants of those who experienced that. And again, we let them get away with that thinking when we don’t educate ourselves, find some humility, and act with empathy. And you also have to remember that the people who are saying these things know they are lying to you, because they went to law schools where critical race theory was part of the core curricula AND where the theory was developed. But they’re counting on you to be too lazy to figure that out. So here goes my attempt at describing critical race theory.
Critical race theory comes from critical theory, a tradition within philosophy with original authors such as German philosopher Habermas during or just after World War 2. I want that to sit for a minute.
Critical theory says that institutions and structures, such as schools or health care, have the power to create who we are within society. A good example of this might be with immigration where the policy creates “illegal” immigrants when historically we know this has occurred for people who didn’t actually do anything. You may have heard the saying, “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us,” That is referring to the circumstance where one day people were legally standing in Mexico, and without moving, the very next day, they were illegally standing in the US. In that instance, you may also note that this isn’t a circumstance that would have happened in, let’s say, Ireland because the two countries didn’t fight a war over borders and don’t share a border. But immigration from Mexico is considered to be more criminal than if it is from Ireland.
I’m a teacher, so I did some sneaky things in there. I didn’t pick Ireland on accident. The US has always had an interesting history with Irish immigrants to the Northeast, including indentured servitude and housing settlements. That’s sort of the point. It was the policy, not the person.
Also, our friend Habermas probably would have agreed with my example but he may have given me the side-eye a little on the use policy and nation. That was my modern take. I have also gotten into enough arguments with philosophy professors to know that they have some issue distinguishing science from the sublime, meaning I believe borders and what they create are arbitrary and they don’t. I don’t think there is a difference between people across borders that were put there more recently than the people. But most philosophers will say that race, gender, nation, etc. are settled science and not worth further discussion. Remember this part too.
So now you have critical theory and the post-modernists like Foucault, Weber, and Kant debating about institutions such as punishment and labor and they find their way to law schools. After all, who might be most responsible for creating and interpreting laws and policies more than budding lawyers, judges, and politicians. It’s also important here to note that critical theory is analyzing for impact, meaning, for example, how might this law impact how prisons function? As a side note, this is why it is important to pay attention to the decisions courts make and how they are interpreting institutions. For example, look at how abortion decisions define womanhood and labor, or how marriage decisions define masculinity. You’ll find that even if you are not someone who is directly considering an abortion or marriage, you are being defined according to how the state will identify womanhood, labor, and masculinity, in those cases and among other institutions. Then you’ll wonder why your insurance is weird, or why you don’t get overtime pay, or why daycare costs so much, or why you are having so much trouble buying a house as a single person.
Alright, so that gets us to critical race theory. Critical race theory started at Harvard Law School and was later advanced by scholars such as Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Cheryl Harris (who, full disclosure, served on my MA thesis committee). CRT examines laws and policies for racial impacts. It’s important to make that distinction because it doesn’t just claim that racism exists; it’s a method to find exactly where it does exist. For example, Bell examines the impacts of Brown v Board of Education on schooling for Black students. In that work, he introduces us to interest convergence, or the idea that Black people are only granted rights if White people will gain rights as a result. School desegregation is a great example of this because subsequent laws not only made schools more segregated now than they were at the time of the ruling, but predominantly White schools, including higher education, have become wealthier on the backs of Black students and HBCUs. I’ll describe more about how that is done in a later post. It’s also important that I point out that this isn’t opinion. With CRT, one can trace the laws and their impacts.
Another great contemporary example is looking at criminal justice after the 13th Amendment. The 13th Amendment states that slavery is abolished, except for as a form of punishment. Guess how much incarceration rates increased right after that. And it wasn’t because Black people were suddenly committing more crimes. Consider the percentage of prisoners who are incarcerated because they couldn’t afford bail, and bail for things like stealing a backpack like with Kalief Browder. Or the percentage of prisoners who are incarcerated for being homeless. Or serving life because they had weed on them for the third time. Or not using their turn signal. Or having a gang enhancement for being at a family party. White people do the same things. Why aren’t they in prison at the same rates? Opioids seems to get rehab, not prison. And a certain politician has committed crime after crime after crime…and never ends up in prison.
I think most people understand what I’ve pointed out there, but they seem to get hung up on who is responsible for that. That gets me to the tenets of critical race theory. CRT believes the following:
Racism is built into the structures of the country and therefore can’t be dismantled as it would require everything to come down. This is where you find people like Nikole Hannah-Jones sitting when she places focus on the year 1619, when chattel slavery began in the colonies. In that argument, you see how that particular type of slavery is the core of American capitalism and democracy, and most every institution in this country. So to make capitalism less racist, you would have to end it, which, like Hannah-Jones, I don’t think that’s happening. Therefore the implication in this tenet is that racism is never going away.
But you still have to fight to end racism though. It’s the act of fighting that gives one optimism even if it isn’t going anywhere.
Race is a social construct. Usually this idea includes all the racial formation scholars, and I include myself in that space. Race as a social construct means that we assign meaning and value to biological manifestations of race. This is probably the one that is argued the most because people don’t want to acknowledge that they’ve given negative meaning to race, or that we were created it. I usually use myself as an example. Sometimes I’m Black, African American, Afro-Latinx, Nicaraguan, Panamanian…When people ask me if I’m Nicaraguan, they’ll ask me to speak Spanish to prove it. Or they’ll say I look more Panamanian or “Are you sure you’re not Dominican?” It might be she’s Black “but she has long, natural hair.” And when I apply to things that are for Hispanic or Latinx founders, I am almost always referred to the similar fund that is just for Black founders. As Gina Torres likes to say, “the US likes for its Latinos to look Italian.” But my family’s countries of origin never changed. My skin color never changed. How I speak Spanish hasn’t changed. We just assigned different meaning to it.
Racism relies on White innocence. This is my favorite because this is where you see people scramble. White innocence is a way to forgive racist acts because there either isn’t a perpetrator or it was actually your own fault. This is the “I’m sorry if …” apology and “I was just saying the lyrics in that song. How was I supposed to know I couldn’t say it?” Or, “I thought he had a gun in his pocket.” Or, “I felt threatened by the loud music.” Or, “Maybe he shouldn’t wear a hoodie,” Or, “All my friends are Black.” It’s interesting to me that we’ve gotten to a place where we know blaming the short skirt for sexual assault is wrong, but it still takes an egregious amount of video evidence to get some people to believe for just a moment that “Black lives matter” needs to be said. This is also one my favorite ones to work through because I’ve come to realize that one’s innocence matters only as far as I was setting out to blame you. Like Shaggy’s “it wasn’t me” when no one said it was you, but now you’ve told on yourself so I think it was you.
Black people attain rights so long as there is an inherent gain to White people. This is interest convergence. This also goes back to responsibility. No one wants to take the blame if it means something will be taken away from them; but they are more than happy to reap the rewards. For example, White women gain the most from affirmative action laws but they are also the people who complain about them the most. Complain more, get more. Meanwhile, Black students have better grades and better test scores than their White peers, and have lower admissions rates.
Black people need to tell their own stories. Consider what silencing does and why we still say representation matters. I’m going to let this sit for a little bit too and for all my literature enthusiasts, consider what Chinua Achebe and Toni Morrison do for you that Harper Lee and Mark Twain don’t.
So back to my question about responsibility. It is implied in there. You have to believe that White gains are ill-gotten and sort of systemically refuted to understand responsibility a bit more. For me, this makes what’s happening in Florida or even the pushback to 1619 Project fascinating. They’re proving this point. And you can trace the public rhetoric that leans into White innocence with voter suppression laws. Have you heard Beto O’Rourke say Texas is not a blue or red state; it’s a voter-suppressed state? Consider the amount of voter suppression laws that passed after the federal voting rights act passed. If you do, that’s a CRT analysis.
Also, when you are considering responsibility, remember this is likely the thing that’s causing whatever pushback from whomever you’re talking to. But remember that first thing I said about the non-argument argument. No one said anything about that. And, Tenet #1, right? Who is responsible is already given. We’ve moved past that. You can’t have raceless racism. Latin America has already tried that.
Move past that point. Figure out what you’re doing next.
Last thing, I prefer to combine machine learning and CRT because there is an objectivity to this analysis. In looking not one’s race as biological fact, but rather the implications of one’s race on whatever practice I’m trying to predict, it’s revolutionary and frankly more accurate.
I didn’t do a great job at citing here but here are some references: The New Jim Crow, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, and The Possessive Investment in Whiteness.
