All content tagged with: Critical Race Theory

Filter

  • How Critical Race Theory Marginalizes the African American Christian Tradition

    This Article offers the first comprehensive account of the marginalization of the African American Christian tradition in the movement of race and law scholarship known as critical race theory. While committed to grounding itself in the perspectives of communities of color, critical race theory has virtually ignored the significance of the fact that the civil rights movement came out of the Black church and that today more than eighty percent of African Americans self-identify as Christian. In practical terms, critical race theory’s neglect of the Christian tradition has meant that arguments developed in race and law scholarship are sometimes incompatible with the deeply religious normative frameworks that many Black Americans bring to bear on issues of law and justice. As a result, there is a significant disconnect between race and law scholarship and the comprehensive normative commitments of the community whose concerns that scholarship seeks to address. By offering the first comprehensive account of this disconnect, this Article supplies an important foundation for scholars who wish to close the gap between race and law scholarship and the larger African American community.

  • Rawls and Reparations

    In the past two years, four related events have sharpened debates on race in the U.S.: President Obama's election, the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, that Court's ruling in Ricci v. DeStefano, and the arrest of Obama's friend, Harvard professor Henry Gates. The President has spoken of a "teaching moment" arising from these events. Moreover, his writings, speeches and lawmaking efforts illustrate the contractual nature of Obama's thinking. The President (and all concerned citizens) should thus find useful an analysis of racial policy and justice in light of the work of John Rauls. Rawls may be the most influential political theorist of our time. Applying his theory to questions of race policy, this Article defends the following counterintuitive thesis: while strong forms of affirmative action cannot be derived from Rawls's theory, strong forms of legislative reparations can be so derived. This Article concludes with a concrete plan for raising the resources such reparations would require.

  • Accumulation

    Anthony Farley brings a focus on class back to Critical Race Theory by exploring the intersection of race and class as a singular concept that finds its creation in the marking of difference through the primal scene of accumulation. Professor Farley's Essay contends that the rule of law is the endless unfolding of that primal scene of accumulation. By choosing to pray for legal relief rather than dismantling the system, the slave chooses enslavement over freedom. Professor Farley discusses the concept of ownership as violence and explains that property rights are the means of protecting the master class until everything and everyone comes to be owned. The commodification of race and its twin concept of class through the market based system show how the rule of law is only the disguise for the rule of one group over another, white-over-black.

  • From Race to Class Struggle: Re-Problematizing Critical Race Theory

    The misconstrual of "class" as a theoretical and analytic concept for defining group or individual identity has led, especially during the Cold War period, to its confusion with status, life-style, and other ideological contingencies. This has vitiated the innovative attempt of CRT to link racism and class oppression. We need to reinstate the Marxist category of class derived from the social division of labor that generates antagonistic class relations. Class conflict becomes the key to grasping the totality of social relations of production, as well as the metabolic process of social reproduction in which racism finds its effectivity. This will help us clarify the changing modes of racist practices, especially in global market operations where immigrant female labor plays a decisive role. This Essay uses the example of Filipina domestics as a global social class actualized in its specific historical particularity as gendered, neocolonized subjects of capital accumulation. CRT can be renewed by adopting class struggle as the means of resolving racial injustice through radical structural transformation.

  • Engaging the Spirit of Racial Healing Within Critical Race Theory: An Exercise in TransformativeThought

    This essay posits that Critical Race Theory (CRT) must operate at both the "idealist" and "materialist" levels. Although the emphasis may be in one direction or another at particular times, both domains are continually engaged. This essay links the debate between the "materialist" and "idealist" views to another central theme within CRT, which is the need for "justice" and how the law relates to justice. This essay focuses on the contemporary debate surrounding the status of Native Hawaiians to show how "race" is being used to construct the civil and political rights of Native Hawaiian people. CRT is a jurisprudence of possibility precisely because it rejects standard liberal frameworks and precisely because it seeks to be inclusive of different groups and different experiences. As I envision the future of CRT, I want to engage a discussion about "justice" and the relationship of justice to political or racial healing. Thus, this essay seeks to identify the foundation for CRT, as the need to achieve "social justice" for groups that have suffered a history of oppression, and to engage what it means to "heal" injustice which is embedded in society at the level of both structure and consciousness. Part I of the essay explicates the scholarly debate between Professors Delgado and Johnson and offers three general themes which are useful to understand CRT as a vehicle for transformative thought in American jurisprudence. Part II probes the relationship of justice to law, drawing on contemporary work in political theory dealing with transformative political change, and sets the framework for the case study on contemporary Native Hawaiian political and legal rights, which is featured in Part III. In analyzing the case study, this essay examines the historical context within which Native Hawaiian rights are situated, and compares the analysis in the federal court cases that are constructing contemporary Native Hawaiian rights as well as the rights of non-Natives. Finally, Part IV of the essay explores the theme of racial healing and suggests how the idealist and materialist frameworks of thought within CRT might be used to effectuate the necessary change.

  • The Sacred Way of Tibetan CRT Kung Fu: Can Race Crits Teach the Shadow’s Mystical Insight and Help Law Students “Know” White Structural Oppression in the Heart of the First-Year Curriculum? A Critical Rejoinder to Dorothy A. Brown

    Part I of this Article uses a quasi-parable, in which Dorothy Brown is a Tibetan Master who teaches law students CRT Kung Fu, the monastic fighting skills by which they will acquire the Shadow's mystical insight to "know" the heart of the first-year curriculum. Part II challenges the organizing principles and content on which Brown's Critical Race Theory purports to critically interrogate traditional legal doctrine, applying a New Age Philosophical critique as well as agency theory to crack dealing in Spanish Harlem. I use this case study to argue that crack dealers deliberately and purposefully choose extra-legal economic opportunities, even at the expense of their neighbors and community. The Conclusion demands that Race Crits think outside of the white structural oppression logical box.

  • From Discourse to Struggle: A New Direction in Critical Race Theory

    To commemorate the Michigan Journal of Race & Law's tenth anniversary, they hosted a symposium in February 2005 that marked a shift within critical race theory. Entitled "Going Back to Class?: The Reemergence of Class in Critical Race Theory," the symposium brought together speakers, students, Journal alumni, and members of the community to begin a fuller examination of the relationship between race and class.

  • Race and Class in Political Science

    As a discipline, political science tends to have a split personality on the issue of whether the driving force behind political action is material or ideational. Put too crudely, White scholars tend to focus on structural conditions as the cause of group identity and action, whereas scholars of color tend to focus on group identity and conflict in order to explain structural conditions. More generally, the relevant debate within political science revolves less around Jacques Demrda versus Karl Marx (as in critical race studies) than around W. E. B. DuBois versus Thomas Hobbes-that is, whether "the problem of the twentieth [and other] centur[ies] is the problem of the color line" or whether people are fundamentally se/f-interested individualists whose social interaction is shaped by the opportunities presented in a given political structure. This Essay examines those propositions by discussing important recent work by political scientists in several arenas, including ethnic conflict, nationalism, and a belief in linked fate. It then briefly discusses the author’s own research on the relationship between race and class, and on the possible malleability of racial and ethnic concepts and practices, in order to show one way that identity-based and interest-based political analyses interact. The author concludes that material forces drive most important political disputes and outcomes, but that politics is best understood through a combination of material and ideational lenses.

  • Racism as “The Nation’s Crucial Sin”: Theology and Derrick Bell

    Part I develops Bell's thesis that racism is permanent, an ineradicable structure in American life. Bell's stance here is unrelenting and a direct and deep challenge to liberal notions of racial progress. This section draws out the social facts Bell provides about the status of Blacks in American society and examines Bell's argument for the continuing disparity between the races, particularly the claim that Whites hold on to a property in Whiteness. Part II analyzes Bell's call for action despite racism's permanence. Part III develops Niebuhr's theology of the possibility of action despite sin. Niebuhr too criticizes the liberal-and liberal theological- belief in continuing progress; for Niebuhr, evil is not overcome. Part IV returns to Bell and assesses his religious orientation and the degree it may be receptive to Niebuhr's theology. Part of the assessment here will be whether Bell's stance is more existential rather than religious. Part V concludes by examining some of the larger implications of Bell's thesis: the continuation of deep structures that resist characterization simply as social constructions. Reference will be briefly drawn to the contributions of Bell and critical race theory to a movement beyond nonfoundationalism. Because the Article intends to offer additional grounds for the comprehension of Bell's conundrum-that racism is permanent and yet must be continually fought-the goal is understanding, not criticism. I hence assume Bell's thesis throughout.

  • Multiracial Identity, Monoracial Authenticity & Racial Privacy: Towards an Adequate Theory of Mulitracial Resistance

    This Article is divided into five parts. Part I briefly places the significance of the Supreme Court's affirmative action ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger in context, particularly the implications of its recommended twenty-five year timeframe in recognizing racial diversity. Part II examines the dangerous consequences of implicit assumptions underlying the RPI. More specifically, I investigate the potential ramifications the RPI would have had upon multiple sectors of our society, including healthcare, education, and law enforcement. In the process, I attempt to demonstrate that the concept of racial privacy is a strategic misnomer intended not to protect one's privacy, but rather to privatize race away from the accountability of governmental institutions. Part III discusses multiracial identity and the hierarchy of racial classifications. I examine why multiracial classification advocates conceptually support the RPI but nonetheless remain skeptical of its ability to render racial distinctions meaningless. In Part IV I attempt to illustrate through personal narrative why multiracial identity is not necessarily inconsistent with a regime of self-identified monoracial classification. In addition, I discuss precisely why we should continue to repudiate colorblind initiatives such as Connerly's RPI. Part V addresses the more general difficulties posed by racial classifications, including objections raised by progressive colorblind theorists. In this regard, I attempt to unpack the relationship between racial identity and movements for racial justice, giving some attention to the notion of political race recently articulated by Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres. Ultimately, I hope to offer critical considerations for an effective stratagem, and perhaps, a better fate for positive race conscious remedies in the twenty-five years to come.