Critical Race Theory Explained

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a theoretical framework that looks at how details of our everyday lives are related to race. It studies the beliefs that underlie what seems to be simple commonplace assumptions about race. To show where and how racism still thrives in its “undercover existence.”

Before we agree or disagree with CRT, let’s try to understand it… rejection or acceptance, in ignorance, is a bit cheap.

The idea that after Brown v. BOE, the USA was cured of racism is both logically and historically inaccurate. While laws have obvious impacts on human behavior, the interplay between law and behavior is not a philosophical pondering. Laws were created by people. 

When the odiousness of the racial divide required by law made the USA a cautionary tale in the international community, can we really be confident that the removal of laws came due to a shift in the nature of the people who created those laws? Or, is it more plausible that vanity led to the change?

Now, if the change was not due to a shift in people’s minds and hearts, where did racism, the same racism that animated the laws, went.

In the 1970s, after the Civil Rights movement, Derrick A. Bell Jr., concerned with the lack of progress created the CRT approach.  CTR can be considered a new approach to civil rights, which began as a critique of constitutional law that has branched out to other areas of study.

The six (6) tenets of CRT:

1. Everyday Racism is an everyday experience for people of color in the United States.
2. Racism is largely a result of interest convergence (material determinism).
3. Race is socially constructed.
4. Racism often takes the form of differential Racialization.
5. Everyone’s identity is a product of intersectionality.
6. The experiences of racial minorities have given them what might be called a unique Voice of color.

Racism

Unequal power relations that grow from the sociopolitical domination of one race by another.

Results in segregation, prosecution, and domination.

Material determinism

The desire to advance oneself in the material world helps to determine how the dominant cultural practices in the subordination of a group. The exploitation of people for material gains, usually along racial lines (Consider racial realists vs racial idealists approach to considering the allocation of resources).

Race as a social construct

Racial categories do not reflect biological reality. What does it mean to be biologically white? Who is considered black and why?

Most historians, anthropologists, and sociologists describe human races as a social construct, preferring instead the term population or ancestry, which can be given a clear operational definition

Differential Racialization

Relates to race as a social construct.

When the dominant group defines and redefines what it means to be a part of the minority group at different times in history to serve the shifting needs. Take, for example, the “ONE DROP RULE.”

Intersectionality

It is the idea that race intersects with class, sex, sexual orientation, political orientation, and even personal history.

Unique voices/Voice of color

This is where conservatives really divest as it plays into identity politics, which conservatives love, except for when it is to be corrective.

But see anti-essentialism. 

After writing, I realize this would be better in video format. Click here for video (after Thursday).