Critical Race Theory

Cri$cal Race Theory
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Critical Race Theory, or CRT, is a theoretical and interpretive mode that examines the
appearance of race and racism across dominant cultural modes of expression. In
adopting this approach, CRT scholars attempt to understand how victims of systemic
racism are affected by cultural perceptions of race and how they are able to represent
themselves to counter prejudice.
Closely connected to such fields as philosophy, history, sociology, and law, CRT
scholarship traces racism in America through the nation’s legacy of slavery, the Civil
Rights Movement, and recent events. In doing so, it draws from work by writers like
Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., and
others studying law, feminism, and post-structuralism. CRT developed into its current
form during the mid-1970s with scholars like Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, and Richard
Delgado, who responded to what they identified as dangerously slow progress following
Civil Rights in the 1960s.
Prominent CRT scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia Williams
share an interest in recognizing racism as a quotidian component of American life
(manifested in textual sources like literature, film, law, etc). In doing so, they attempt to
confront the beliefs and practices that enable racism to persist while also challenging
these practices in order to seek liberation from systemic racism.
As such, CRT scholarship also emphasizes the importance of finding a way for diverse
individuals to share their experiences. However, CRT scholars do not only locate an
individual’s identity and experience of the world in his or her racial identifications, but
also their membership to a specific class, gender, nation, sexual orientation, etc. They
read these diverse cultural texts as proof of the institutionalized inequalities racialized
groups and individuals experience every day.
In their seminal book, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Delgado

and Stefencic introduced critical race theory to the social sciences
more broadly. Delgado and Stefencic claimed that critical race theory
is based around the following premises:
• Racism is ordinary, not aberrational.
• Racism serves important purposes.
• Race and races are products of social thought and relations
[and] categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires
when convenient’ (Delgado and Stefencic, 2001: 7).
• Intersectionality: ‘No person has a single, easily stated, unitary
identity […] everyone has potentially conflicting, overlapping
identities, loyalties and allegiances’ (Delgado and Stefencic,
2001: 9).
More recently, Bonilla-Silva (2015: 74) has redeveloped the tenets of

CRT to the following:
• Racism is ‘embedded in the structure of society’.
• Racism has a ‘material foundation’.
• Racism changes and develops over different times.
• Racism is often ascribed a degree of rationality.
• Racism has a contemporary basis.
Central to critical race theory is that racism is much more than

individual prejudice and bigotry; rather, racism is a systemic feature of
social structure. Given that racism is so deeply embedded in social
structure, Bonilla-Silva argues that racial inequality often gets
misrecognised as a natural process rather than a by-product of a
system of racial domination (what he refers to as a ‘racialised social
system’). One example Bonilla-Silva uses is the issue of white
segregation in the US: while they remain one of the most socially
segregated groups in the country; rather than explaining this through
processes such as housing discrimination and whites seeking to ‘flock
together’, this reality is often explained away through a colourblind
logic such that ‘like-minded people naturally gravitate towards each
other’.
Critical race theory offers an invaluable set of literature for scholars of

race and society to engage with. As a social scientific approach, it
encourages us to appreciate how races are constructed into
hierarchies, with societal resources distributed unequally across this
hierarchy. In a time often declared as ‘post-racial’, critical race theory
helps remind us that race is omnirelevant – it may not always be the
single determining factor of a given inequality, nor even the most
important one, but ‘race’ is fundamental to understanding current
regimes of inequality, and that analyses of inequality and its inverse
(privilege and domination), are incomplete without a systematic
discussion of race.
Works Cited
Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. New
York: New York University Press, 2012.
Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic, eds. Critical Race Theory: The Cutting
Edge. 3rd ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013. Print.
Recommended Sources for Additional Research

Bell, Derrick A. “Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory?” University of Illinois Law
Review 4 (1995): 893-910.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, eds. Critical Race
Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. New York: The New Press, 1995
Davis, Peggy. “Law as Microaggression.” Yale Law Journal 98 (1989): 1559-1577.
Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary
Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Harris, Cheryl. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106.8 (1993): 1707-1791.
hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From the Margins to the Center. Boston: South End Press,
1984.
Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit
from Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.
Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar
Book.” Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 64-81.
Williams, Patricia. Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race. New York:
Noonday Press, 1998.

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Cri$cal Race Theory

In their seminal book, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Delgado

More recently, Bonilla-Silva (2015: 74) has redeveloped the tenets of

Central to critical race theory is that racism is much more than

Critical race theory offers an invaluable set of literature for scholars of

Recommended Sources for Additional Research

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