Critical Race Theory History

 I have found that Google Scholar is helpful to get past the media and journalistic fog on a topic.

Google Scholar

When I chose "critical race theory an introduction" I got a list of mainly textbooks on the topic, however I did get at near the top of the list a highly referenced article that included a downloadable pdf.

The Rise, De The Rise, Development and F elopment and Future Directions of Critical Race ections of Critical Race Theory and Related Scholarship

by Athena D. Mutua  (University at Buffalo School of Law)

Below you will find the contents. I have not read the whole thing but it is well organized, and so I have figured out what I need to know which I have summarized below. Some of  you may be interested enough in the whole topic to read the whole thing.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................... 330

I. OVERVIEW ........................................................................................................... 333

II. INTELLECTUAL ANTECEDENTS .................................................................... 340

Ill. CONFLICT AS AN ENGINE OF CRT INTELLECTUAL AND

INSTITUTIONAL GROWTH .................................................................................... 345

A. Alternative Course: Confronting Colorblindness ................................................... 346

B. Conflict with CLS: The African American Experience as an 

Analytical and Methodological Framework ................................................................ 347

C. Internal Conflict within the CRT Workshop: Expanding the Analytical Framework and Building the Commitment to Antisubordination ............................................................................. 349

D. UCLA, Proposition 209 and the Entrenchment of CRT:

Confronting the Whiteness of Colorblindness Again ................................................. 352

IV. CRT TENETS AND METHODOLOGY .................................................. 353

V. LAW AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF RACE ....................................... 358

A. Early Construction of Race by Law ......................................................... 359

B. Colorblindness in Law Blocking Racial Progress ..................... 362

VI. CRT-RELATED SCHOLARSHIP, THE LATCRIT EXAMPLE:

DEEPENING AND BROADENING THE CRT PROJECT? .......... . . . .. . . . . .. . 369

A. Antiessentialism and Intersectionality: Informing Formation,

Leading to Multidimensionality ................................................. 370

B. Multidimensionality: An Emerging Theory? .............................. 373

C. Antisubordination Praxis ........................................................... 374

V II. CLASS CRITS? .................... .. . . . . .. .. . . . .. . . .. . . . . .. . . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . ..

A. Tendencies, Tensions and Fears as Obstacles to Critical Class Analysis .................................................................................... 379

B . W hy ClassCrits? ......................................................................... 388

C ONCLUSION ....................................................393

MY SUMMARY AND OPINION

In the aftermath of the civil right movement, Derek Bell, the first African-American tenured professor at Harvard Law School among others began to question how much progress had been made.  He questioned whether all the desegregation orders and creating racial balance in schools had actually improved the education of Black students.  He also questioned the motives of Whites in supporting the civil rights movement, pointing out that it might have had more to do with presenting a better image of America in the war on Communism than actual concern for Black people. 

One of the main concerns of these critics was the development of the notion of that the law should be "colorblind" even though the notion appealed to some MLK speeches.  

A central theme of Critical Race Theory, therefore, is to explore the ways in which legal colorblindness, in supplanting overt legal racial ordering, has not only allowed law to ignore the social and institutional structures of oppression created historically and recreated presently in law and practice but also has blunted efforts to dismantle the racial caste system, working instead to maintain it. 

The theory of "colorblindness" attributed racial injustice to the internal attitudes of some White people rather than questioning how a social and economic system resulted in so many Black men being in prison, and poorer health, educational, and economic outcomes for Black people.

The critical race workshop met annually from 1989 until 1997. Attendance at the workshop was by application and "invitation only"--a policy that contributed to the critique of CRT as elitist. However, according to Phillips, the policy was meant to facilitate sustained engagement over a five-day period of a small group of people committed to "radical transformative politics."  As such, the workshop did not issue "a general invitation to all legal scholars of color, no matter how conservative or parochial, to simply come hang out."' Rather, she suggests, this was the workshop's attempt to institute what Frank Valdes later called "a move from color to consciousness," the idea that "alliances are best built on shared substantive commitments, perhaps stemming from similar experiences .. .with subordination, rather than traditional fault lines like race or ethnicity. But, this principle was not extended to include white scholars with similar commitments. White scholars were excluded from participating in the workshop, a decision which generated debate as to whether this was a pragmatic attempt to construct safe space and inhibit the reproduction of white racial hierarchy, or simply an unprincipled decision.'  In either case, the question became moot with the cessation of annual CRT workshops and the almost simultaneous founding of the annual LatCrit conferences with its commitment to anti-essentialist practice and its open-door policy that welcomed whites

So while CRT began as a Black movement it was taken over by a broad coalition of people with other interests: feminist, Latino/a, gay and lesbian. Rather than seeing things through a Black vs. White dichotomy they saw Whites (mostly men) dominating a whole stretch of groups (women, Hispanics, gays) as well as Blacks. Two important insights that have shaped this have been the anti-essentialist insight (not all Blacks, or women are the same) and the intersection insight ( Black women are treated as both Black and Woman, i.e. doubly subordinate)

The anti-essentialist insight was complemented by intersectional theory, which allowed for a more nuanced understanding of intra-group difference. It simultaneously demonstrated the links between different systems of subordination such as racism, sexism, and heterosexism as located in the particular social positions of racial subgroups, such as Latinas or black women.  Intersectional theory, first articulated as a theory by Kimberly Crenshaw, drew upon black feminist thought which had consistently argued that black women were not only oppressed by the white supremacist system of racism but were also oppressed by the patriarchal practices and system of sexism. The theory thus explored the experiences of black women at the intersection of racism and sexism, rejecting a single-axis framework (race or gender) for understanding the arguably doubly burdened conditions of black women.

However for all this concern about domination usually as expressed in culture such as art, literature and music,  the author of this monograph says that CRT has ignored the issue of class, i.e. economics

But political and other analytical pressures also exist that may have hindered the development of class analyses within CRT and strengthened the tendency toward the discursive turn. For example, hesitancy to take on class may result from fear of analyzing or critiquing capitalism, the reigning economic order, given the political environment that champions unfettered capitalism as a panacea for all ills despite its apparent tendency to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few. This tendency uninterrupted by policy decisions to curb it or disrupt its lopsided material distributions, has increasingly created and cemented vast economic inequalities in the social system, widening and hardening the gap between the rich and the poor. However, engagement with class issues as a potential critique of this situation may be seen as politically difficult and unpopular given the politics of triumphant which celebrate the failure of communism and conclude the inadequacy of Marxist analyses with their particular emphasis on class divisions.