Tag Archives: Kimberle Crenshaw

Critical Race Theory And Its Conservative Critics

Monica Schipper | Getty Images

In 1989, a youngish black law professor named Kimberle Crenshaw introduced two terms into academic discourse—“critical race theory” and “intersectionality.” Of the two terms, “critical race theory” became a significant school of legal thought and is taught mostly in law schools while “intersectionality” has had a monumental impact on sociology, anthropology, history, and any field that deals with women, masculinity, race, ethnicity, disabilities, immigrants, colonialism, and the like. Indeed, intersectionality may be the single most influential conceptual innovation of the last 40 years. Coining critical race theory made Crenshaw important but intersectionality made her a legend. To give a sports analogy, it’s as if Simone Biles was not only the greatest gymnast of all time but a highly ranked tennis pro as well.

What is Critical Race Theory? Let’s start with some basics. Critical Race Theory is a legal literature that was developed by a multiracial set of Black, Asian, Native American, Hispanic lawyers and sought mostly to rethink the working of race in American legal doctrine. In the civil rights court decisions of the 1970’s and 1980’s, the prevailing assumption was that individuals, private business, and government were “color-blind,” and that racial discrimination should be thought of as a deviation from that standard. Under the color-blind standard, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was rightly found guilty for his murder of George Floyd, but he would have been considered in individual terms a “bad apple” motivated by overt racism rather than an example of a pattern. Traditional civil rights law would not have seen the Minneapolis Police Department as discriminatory or racist even though there were six previous complaints about Chauvin putting non-white men into chokeholds, an incident of Chauvin kneeling “on the back of a 14-year-old Black boy for 17 minutes” in 2017, and 18 complaints filed against Chauvin altogether. There would not have been any questions about the training of Minneapolis police officers, the rules governing police conduct, the ways in which rules were applied in encounters between white police and non-white populations, and the extent to which police violence against racial minorities was seen as a positive or normal thing by the white population. To the contrary, Critical Race Theorists believe that white supremacy is normalized in institutional hiring practices, training, salary scales, promotion decisions, and human relations practices and the term “systemic racism” became prominent during the aftermath of the George Floyd murder.

Critical Race Theory works like any critical methodology. It takes established points of view that are considered fair, just, or methodologically correct, and demonstrates that there are hierarchies, interests, or domination in the working of the system. Early Christianity was known for its deconstruction of the traditional Roman gods as myths, idols, or demons. Fifteen hundred years later, Karl Marx sought to show that far from involving a “rational distribution” of wealth as proponents claimed, the free exchange of the capitalist system resulted in class exploitation, crisis, and revolution. What Critical Race Theory uncovers is that white racial consciousness is an important element in an American legal system that’s officially dedicated to ideals of color-blind equality. From the Critical Race Theory perspective, Officer Chauvin would not have been a “bad apple” in an otherwise non-discriminatory police department so much as an example of the white racial antagonism among urban police, biased rules and procedures in the Minneapolis Police Department, and popular white support for harsh police treatment of minorities.  

In an early essay in the Critical Race Theory collection, Crenshaw identifies white race consciousness in this way:

My purpose here is to examine the deep-rooted problem of racist ideology—or white race consciousness—and to suggest how this form of consciousness legitimates prevailing injustices and constrains the development of new solutions that would benefit black Americans.

Critical Race Theory is also known for defining race as “socially constructed” rather than biological, relying on narrative story telling as an alternative to legal or social science analysis, and critical understanding of classic Supreme Court decisions like Brown v Board of Education as serving elite white liberal political interests as well as racial justice. One of the best articles in the Critical Race Theory literature is “Whiteness as Property” by UCLA law professor Cheryl Harris. Harris begins by discussing how her grandmother spent several years passing as “white” in order to hold a job at a high-end clothing outlet because such jobs were limited to whites. In this sense, whiteness was a form of property that made Harris’ grandmother eligible for certain kinds of employment or higher levels of income. I’m interested in that because my mother’s side of the family has gone through at least two rounds of mixed-race marriage, passing, and “re-whitening” after their arrival in 1640’s New Amsterdam.

“Whiteness as Property” is brilliant scholarship that is still vital 30 years later.

The same can’t be said for conservative critics of Critical Race Theory. The steep decline in conservative intellectual life doesn’t get much attention, but there’s been no monumentally important conservative work to match The 1619 Project or the long string of great books by Patricia Hill Collins, Catherine MacKinnon, Michel Foucault, the British historian E.P. Thompson, and others going back to WWII. Structural anthropology, feminism, the Frankfurt School, post-structuralism, post-modernism, black feminism, and the linguistic turn are all still influential, but conservatives made no effort to keep up, and in many ways, have lost contact with the mainstream of Western and Global intellectual life.

In this sense, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the white conservative campaign against Critical Race Theory has been so intellectually lazy and incompetent.

The primary white conservative critic of Critical Race Theory, Christofer Rufo, views Critical Race Theory as “little more than reformulated Marxism.” Likewise, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida says that  “Critical race theory is Marxist-inspired indoctrination.” However, Crenshaw and the critical race theorists have a critical analysis of whiteness and racial hierarchy—not capitalism and class hierarchy. They want reform, not revolution. They write about the legal system not the economic system. The Critical Race Theorists don’t have anything analogous to what Neo-Marxists concepts of hegemony or the culture industry either. In fact, Critical Race Theory is best understood as a successor to the civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, is influenced mostly by Martin Luther King and the social movements influenced by civil rights thinking, especially black feminism, immigrant rights activism, LGBT rights campaigns, disability activism, and Native American politics. Given the crucial importance of civil rights for American politics and culture, Critical Race Theory is much better connected to the mainstream of American life than most forms of intellectual conservatism have been for decades.

Rufo claims that Critical Race Theorists don’t believe any progress has been made for black people, but Crenshaw and others given enormous credit to the Civil Rights movement for gaining rights and making progress for black Americans and cite that progress as part of their argument for rejecting Marxism. Their critique of civil rights law concerns the barriers that the Supreme Court has created to further progress on desegregation, racial discrimination, and police violence. By the way, Rufo read the same authors as I did but is neither skilled enough nor honest enough to acknowledge the distinction.

Other critics have expanded on Rufo to promote blatant lies about Critical Race Theory advocating many positions they clearly do not hold, i.e., —that “all whites are … inherently racist,” that white people are “should feel guilty because of their skin color,” that America is inherently evil,” etc. And Rufo is fine with this because his criticisms of Critical Race Theory were all about marketing: quoting “We have successfully frozen their brand—’critical race theory’—into the public conversation… as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.” And what has gone under the “Critical Race Theory Brand” and been removed from public school reading lists and libraries also includes the novels of Toni Morrison and white classics like “The Diary of Anne Frank” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Not being honest about Critical Race Theory in the first place, critics of Critical Race Theory are now putting all kinds of anti-race materials and really, any kind of mainstream non-conservative history, under the Critical Race Theory label and trying to ban them from public education.

Check Your Privilege

Many of my students at Morehead State in KY were in situations as dire or almost as dire as those recounted by “Birgit Umaigha RN MEd”–students struggling to find computers or internet hook ups for online work, working two or three jobs to pay for school, caring for siblings because of addicted parents, going through one death in the family after another, fighting off crushing anxieties. Everything became worse after 2014, but most students continued to do very good to excellent work even as my basic mantra was reduced to “do your best.”

I’m thinking about “check your privilege” as part of the intersectional perspectives that became prominent in the late 80’s and early 90’s. “Intersectionality” was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw to express the way that black women were subject to both racism and sexism. Neither Crenshaw, Angela Davis, bell hooks, or Patricia Hill Collins believed that black women were the only group suffering from multiple, intersecting oppressions and ideas of intersectionality were quickly applied to economic class, immigrant status, disability, sexual orientation, and other hierarchies as well. Within intersectional perspectives, there developed a sense of being obligated to recognize both the fullness of the many ways in which a sector of the population could be oppressed and also the ways in which people could be “privileged” by advantageous positions in the social hierarchy. In this sense, intersectionality has always been associated with an obligation to recognize the full humanity of others.

At the same time, intersectionality has become associated with an ethics of self-recognition that is summed up with “check your privilege.” One element of checking your privilege is to be aware of one’s privilege which with intersectionality means being aware of the full range of social locations that give a person advantageous positions in the hierarchy. In my case, I would have race, gender, cis, educational, class, and ability privilege but would soon be coming up against the disadvantages of extreme age now that I’m almost 68. Within intersectional thinking, all of these privileged locations are identities in the sense of being social facts of my existence and also in defining my ways of perceiving the world, modes of action, etc. The idea of “checking your privilege” undermines the hegemonic white ideology of individualism which views individual attributes (“will,” “hard work,” “intelligence,” “talent,” etc.) as the only relevant source of one’s advantages and disadvantages in life. Consistent with the intersectional obligation to recognize the fullness of other persons, “check your privilege” pushes people, especially people in privileged locations, to engage in a full self-reflection on the nature of their own social locations.

“Check your privilege” also obligates those who are privileged to think, act, and speak on the combination of their reflections on the advantages conferred by various kinds of privilege and how their privileges oppressively affect other people. To “check your privilege” means that people in positions of privilege stop interacting with the world in terms of the social instincts, modes of perception, and cultural norms associated with their advantageous positions. In the case of many wealthy white persons for example, that would mean refraining from acting on their views of themselves as “well off” instead of rich, distinctions between their cultivated taste and middle-brow taste, and assumptions of various kinds of racial hierarchies. In this sense, “check their privilege” involves a critical self-reflection that puts a person outside the culture into which they have been socialized but does not put them into an alternative web of cultural assumptions. There is what Victor Turner called a “liminality” to the obligations involved in checking your privilege. For Turner, “liminality” was primarily a matter of cultural transition in which a person would leave one status prescribed within a culture without having yet adapted another status. “Liminality, in terms of social structure and time, is an intermediate state of being “in between” in which individuals are stripped from their usual identity and their constituting social differences while being on the verge of personal or social transformation.” In the case of “check your privilege,” the obligation is to suspend the cultural modes associated with privileged locations without having another set of cultural modes to adapt. The obligation of people to check their privilege entails a long-term state of liminality.