CRITICAL RACE THEORY: A VERY SHORT SUMMARY
by Thuận P. Nguyễn
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:
To provide a short summary of Critical Race Theory (but not by any means an exhausted summary), I am sharing an excerpt from my master’s thesis, “Who’s Eating Rice? The Sticky Situation of Being a Gay Vietnamese American Man in the LGBTQ Community of Southern California.” I hope that the summary below can serve as an introduction to Critical Race Theory for those who have not had the chance or opportunity to learn about it. I do not claim to be an expert of CRT. I only want to share what I have learned.
I encourage you to visit the reference page at the end to build your reading list as part of furthering your understanding of critical race theory. Please reference and cite this piece (and any cited work included in this piece) appropriately.
INTRODUCTION:
Sociologists regard race as a social construct because the social meanings that society attaches to race, as well as racial categories and identities, change over time due to economic, political, and cultural processes (Bonilla-Silva 2014; Lipsitz 2006; Omi and Winant 2015). Omi and Winant (2015), in particular, define race as “a concept, a representation of signification of identity that refers to different types of human bodies, to the perceived corporeal and phenotypic markers of difference and the meanings and social practices that are ascribed to these differences” (p. 111). Although race is a social construction, Michael Omi and Howard Winant (2015) caution us from thinking that race is an illusion. Instead, race scholars implore us to see race as a social reality because race is used to shape a racialized social system that privileges people in the United States who are considered white over those considered to be nonwhite (Bonilla-Silva 2014; Lipsitz 2006; Omi and Winant 2015). As George Fredrickson (2002) states, “Racism . . . is more than theorizing about human differences or thinking badly of a group over which one has no control. It either directly sustains or proposes to establish a racial order [sic], a permanent group hierarchy. . . .” (p. 6). Simply put, race shapes racism, resulting in a racial hierarchy that privileges white people by allowing them to dominate nonwhite people economically, politically, and culturally (Fredrickson 2002; Omi and Winant 2015).
Borrowing from Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s definitions of racism (2014), this thesis conceptualizes racism both as a racial ideology and racial structure. As a racial ideology, racism is a racial-based framework in which the dominant racial group (i.e., whites) use to explain and justify their dominance. In doing so, racism helps “glue and, at the same time, organize the nature and character of race relations in a society” (Bonilla-Silva 2014:26). As a racial structure, racism is “the totality of the social relations and practices that reinforce white privilege” (Bonilla-Silva 2014:9). That is to say, white supremacy functions through racism.
Scholars maintain that racism does not fully operate like it once did during and before the Civil Rights era (Alexander 2012; Bonilla-Silva 2014; Collins 2004; Lipsitz 2006; Omi and Winant 2015). Gone are the days of overtly racist laws and practices such as state-sanctioned enslavement of African Americans, segregationist Jim Crow laws, and anti-miscegenation laws that forbade interracial romantic relationships. Racism now operates in changed ways that are subtler, less overt, colorblind, voided of racist language, and in a race-neutral-like fashion, thus creating an illusion that racism itself has disappeared when it has not (Alexander 2012; Bonilla-Silva 2014; Collins 2004; Lipsitz 2006). As Derrek Bell (1992) argues, “Indeed, the racism that made slavery feasible is far from dead. . . .” (p. 3). Although racism operates in changed ways, it continues to reproduce a racial ideology and structure that privileges whites over nonwhites (Bonilla- Silva 2014; Collins 2004; Lipsitz 2006).
CRITICAL RACE THEORY AND INTERSECTIONALITY — THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS
Legal scholars began developing Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the mid-1970s as a response to Critical Legal Studies inadequacy in addressing the effects of race and racism in the United States (DeCuir and Dixson 2004; Delgado and Stefancic 2012; Han 2008b). CRT particularly responded to the subtle ways in which racism began to take hold during the post-Civil Rights era and the need for new theories and strategies to tackle these racial issues (Delgado and Stefancic 2012). CRT is not a singular grand theory about race and racism but a multifaceted approach to understanding and affecting changes to racialized social institutions. Although each tenet of CRT may not be particularly unique to CRT, as there are other theories of race and racism that share similar theoretical ideas (e.g., Omi and Winant’s racial formation theory), CRT is a useful theoretical framework for this study because of its multifaceted tenets in analyzing and tackling issues of race and racism.
This section will cover four tenets of CRT that are particularly applicable for this study, the first of which is the social construction thesis that views race as a social construct. In line with Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s racial formation theory [in which the scholars define racial formation as “the sociohistorical process by which racial identities are created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed” (p. 109)], race as a social construct means that it is not fixed, objected, nor is it rooted in any biological or genetic reality. Omi and Winant (2015) and critical race theorists stress that the construction of race and racial meanings are part of a universal social process that classifies people based on real and imagined attributes. From a CRT perspective, if race and racial meanings are social constructs, then we can reconstruct race and deconstruct racism to dismantle the racial hierarchy that it produces since racial ideologies, structures, and practices are of our making (Delgado and Stefancic 2012).
The second tenet of CRT is the recognition of the permanence of racism (Bell 1992; DeCuir and Dixon 2004; Taylor 1998). As Bell (1992) provocatively argues, “. . .[R]acism is a permanent component of American life” (p. 13). Recognizing the permanence of racism does not mean that we should tolerate or submit to its permanent quality since critical race theorists discourage and challenge complacency regarding how we address racism. It does, however, require that we adopt a realistic and race-conscious view to better understand and respond to racism’s changing dynamic (DeCuir and Dixon 2004; Delgado and Stefancic 2012; Taylor 1998).
Recognizing the permanence of racism means that we are not blind to its history nor colorblind to its existence since we cannot address something if we do not first see it. It is realizing that racism has historically played and continues to play a dominant role in shaping people’s lives in American society (Bell 1992; Lawrence 1995; Taylor 1998). It is understanding that we have normalized and deeply embedded racism into the broader U.S. social structure that governs all aspects of economic, political, and cultural life (Bell 1992; Collins 2009; DeCuir and Dixon 2004; Delgado and Stefancic 2012; Lawrence 1995; Solórzano and Yosso 2002; Taylor 1998). As Collins (2009) states, “. . . [R]acism is not something that exists in the distance. We encounter racism in everyday situations” (p. 26). It is this embeddedness that has given white supremacy its longevity. In short, working with the CRT framework requires us to recognize that racism affects all of our beliefs, attitudes, and ideas regarding race, and how it particularly affects the everydaylived experiences of people of color (POC) (Collins 2009; Lawrence 1995; Han 2008b; Taylor 1998).
The third tenet of CRT focuses on real-life counter-stories told by POC about their lived experience to produce experiential knowledge that challenges dominant narratives that perpetuate and reinforce racism (Crenshaw et al. 1995; DeCuir and Dixon 2004; Delgado and Stefancic 2012). For the dominant group, the stories that they tell construct a reality that exists to their benefit and justifying that reality as natural and normal (Crenshaw et al. 1995; Delgado 1989). Counter-stories subvert the dominant stories told by the dominant group wherein society often takes as social facts about marginalized groups without verifying the truth (DeCuir and Dixson 2004; Delgado 1989; Delgado and Stefancic 2012). As Adalberto Aguirre (2000) explains, critical race scholars examine stories as a methodological tool to highlight the voice of racially marginalized individuals and communities whose stories have been suppressed by the majority. Likewise, Solórzano and Yosso (2002) state that “critical race theorists view [experiential] knowledge as a strength and draw explicitly on the lived experiences of people of color by including such methods as storytelling, family histories, biographies, scenarios, parables, cuentos, testimonios, chronicles, and narratives” (p. 26).
Critical race scholars embrace the subjectivity of perspectives, reject the idea that research should be ‘neutral’ and ‘objective,’ and recognize the legitimacy of experiential knowledge because the stories that we tell (re)construct our social reality (Crenshaw et al. 1995; Delgado 1989; Delgado and Stefancic 2012; Taylor 1998; Solórzano and Yosso 2002). . . . As Richard Delgado (1989) wrote: “[E]xposing oneself to [stories] . . . enable the listener and teller to build a world richer than either could make alone. . . . It is through this process that we can overcome enthnocentrism [sic] and the unthinking conviction that our way of seeing the world is the only one — that the way things are is inevitable, natural, just, and best — when it is, for some, full of pain, exclusion, and both petty and major tyranny” (p. 2439). Mari Matsuda (1995) echoes Delgado’s sentiment, stating that “those who have experienced discrimination speak with a special voice to which we should listen” (p. 63). . . . Crenshaw et al. (1995) also explain that critical race scholarships “may be read as contributions to what Edward Said has called ‘antithetical knowledge,’ the development of counter-accounts of social reality by subversive and subaltern elements of the reigning order. Critical Race Theory . . . rejects the prevailing orthodoxy that scholarship should be or could be ‘natural’ or ‘objective’” (p. XIII).
The fourth and final tenet of interest, based on a concept developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw and women of color feminist scholars and activists, is to examine race and racism from an intersectional outlook (Crenshaw 1995; Potter 2013; Collins 2009). Intersectionality pushes us to understand and analyze social problems based on complex interactions between various social dimensions (Collins and Bilge 2016). As part of an intersectional approach. . . . Collins’s (2009) theoretical concept of the matrix of domination to explore how intersecting forms of oppressions are organized based on social positions and contexts. That is, as Collins (2009) explains, “[A]ll individuals and groups possess varying amounts of penalty and privilege in one historically created system. . . . Depending on the context, individuals and groups may be alternatively oppressors in some settings, oppressed in others, or simultaneously oppressing and oppressed in still others” (p. 265).
REFERENCES:
Aguirre Jr., Adalberto. 2000. “Academic Storytelling: A Critical Race Theory Story of Affirmative Action.” Sociological Perspectives 43(2) 319–339. doi: 10.2307/1389799.
Alexander, Michelle. 2012. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York, NY: New York Press.
Bell, Derrek. 1992. Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2014. Racism without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. 4th ed. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2004. Black Sexual Politics: African American, Gender, and the New Racism. New York, NY: Routledge.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2009. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Routledge.
Collins, Patricia Hill and Sirma Bilge. 2016. Intersectionality. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, eds. 1995. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. New York, NY: The New Press.
DeCuir, Jessica T, and Adrienne D. Dixson. 2004. “‘So When It Comes Out, They Aren’t That Surprised That It Is There’: Using Critical Race Theory as a Tool of Analysis of Race and Racism in Education.” Educational Researcher 33(5):26–31.
Delgado, Richard. 1989. “Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative.” Michigan Law Review 87(8):2411–2441.
Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. 2012. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. New York, NY: New York University Press.
Fredrickson, George M. 2002. Racism: A Short History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Han, Chong-suk. 2008b. “No Fats, Femmes, or Asians: The Utility of Critical Race Theory in Examining the Role of Gay Stock Stories in the Marginalization of Gay Asian Men.” Contemporary Justice Review 11(1):11–22. doi: 10.1080/10282580701850355.
Lawrence, Charles R. 1995. “The ID, the EGO, and Equal Protection: Reckoning with Unconscious Racism.” Pp. 235–257 in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, edited by K. Crenshaw, N. Gotanda, G. Peller, and K. Thomas. New York, NY: The New Press.
Lipsitz, George. 2006. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Revised and Expanded ed. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Matsuda, Mari. 1995. “Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Reparations.” Pp.63–70 in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, edited by K. Crenshaw, N. Gotanda, G. Peller, and K. Thomas. New York, NY: The New Press.
Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 2015. Racial Formation in the United States. 3rd ed. New York, NY: Routledge.
Potter, Hillary. 2013. “Intersectional Criminology: Interrogating Identity and Power in Criminological Research and Theory.” Critical Criminology 21(3):305–318. doi: 10.1007/s10612–013–9203–6.
Solórzano, Daniel G., and Tara J. Yosso. 2002. “Critical Race Methodology: Counter-Storytelling as an Analytical Framework for Education Research.” Qualitative Inquiry 8(1):23–44. doi: 10.1177/107780040200800103.
Taylor, Edward. 1998. “A Primer on Critical Race Theory: Who Are the Critical Race Theorists and What Are They Saying?” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 19(1):122–124.
