The Racialized Social System. Ali Meghji
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unit filled with stuff – theories, themes, practices and the like […] In the same way that Kendall Thomas reasoned that race was better thought of as a verb rather than a noun, I want to suggest that shifting the frame of CRT toward a dynamic rather than static reference would be a productive means by which we can link CRT’s past to the contemporary moment.
In thinking of CRT as a verb rather than a noun, Crenshaw thus proposed we think of it as a practice, or methodology, for thinking about racism rather than as a theoretical framework per se. However, this did not mean that others in the CRT canon did not try to lay out some conceptual foundations of the CRT framework – and indeed, as we will see, scholars particularly in educational studies found these early attempts at making a CRT framework very fruitful for their analyses.
It was perhaps in Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s two books Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge (2000[1995]) and Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2001) that we see some of the early attempts to specify the key tenets of CRT in a way that still remains popular several decades later. While both Delgado and Stefancic were legal scholars firmly rooted in the ‘first wave’ of legally informed CRT scholarship, their tenets of CRT were – in theory – applicable well outside of the study of the legal system itself. These tenets were as follows.
1. Racism is ordinary, not aberrational. Central to CRT – as iterated by Delgado and Stefancic – is the idea that racism happens because of social arrangements, not in spite of them. This requires moving beyond the limited view of racism as an act of individual bigotry, and instead envisaging racism as a structural power relation. Such an argument, as Delgado and Stefancic show, had obvious connotations in the field of legal studies from which CRT emerged. As noted formerly, it meant that CRT scholars encouraged the US courts, judges and whole legal apparatus to go beyond an understanding of racial discrimination as something that had to be an intentional action by an actor, and instead to embrace an understanding of discrimination that also took into consideration the wider structural effects of racialization: whether that be the role of historical segregation on current relations, the use of officially ‘race-neutral’ criteria for certain jobs (e.g. a certain level of qualification, or score on a means test) which ends up disadvantaging Black Americans, race-neutral hiring or admissions policies which treat all racialized applicants as equal despite their differing locations in social hierarchies, and so on.
2. Racism serves important purposes. Once we conceive of racism as being ordinary, rather than being a ‘glitch’ in the system, we can gain an understanding of how it does not ‘just happen’ but serves specific purposes. Again, this was a point made in the context of legal studies that is simultaneously applicable outside the legal field. Early CRT scholars pointed out how racism functioned in the legal system not as an aberration, but as a means of both rationalizing and reproducing racial inequality. This can be seen in the aforementioned cases of anti-discrimination legislation being invoked to justify racial discrimination, just as much as it can be seen in the enforcement of constitutional colour blindness (for instance, in California’s Proposition 209 in 1996, which prohibited state governmental institutions from considering race in public employment, public contracting and public education), or in clauses in the US Constitution, such as in the 13th amendment, which prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude except as a punishment for a crime of which one has been convicted – all of which may appear to be race-neutral but are in fact deeply entrenched in producing racial inequality.
3. Race and races are products of social thought and relations. Here, we see CRT committing to a constructionist conception of race whereby ‘races’ are ‘not objective, inherent or fixed, they correspond to no biological or genetic reality; rather, races are categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient’ (Delgado and Stefancic 2000[1995]: 7). Of course, this constructionist approach resonates with the earlier CRT ethos of ‘uncovering how law was a constitutive element of race itself: in other words, how law constructed race’ (Crenshaw et al. 1995: xxv). Through this constructionist approach to the race and law, CRT was able to show how racialization was never an ‘even process’ but always a process that was itself embedded in power relations; from the definition of Black Americans as ‘property’ through the period of enslavement, through to legalization of the one-drop rule, and the legalized conversion of the Chinese from a nationality to a racial group in 1870 to justify the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1888.13
4. The importance of intersectionality. While CRT has been accused of race-centrism,14 intersectionality features as one of its foundational concepts. As Delgado and Stefancic (2000[1995]: 9) summarized in their CRT tenets: ‘No person has a single, easily stated, unitary identity […] everyone has potentially conflicting, overlapping identities, loyalties and allegiances.’ Indeed, one of the key pioneers of CRT – Kimberlé Crenshaw – was also a leading figure in developing intersectionality in the field of legal studies. This is not a coincidence. As Crenshaw (1989) argued, the legal system had no legislation to think about issues of gender and race as they are co-articulated. Take DeGraffenreid v. General Motors in 1976, where five Black women brought suit against General Motors, claiming that the business’ seniority system discriminated against Black women due to the fact that they did not hire any Black women prior to the 1964 civil rights legislation. The Court replied that ‘this lawsuit must be examined to see if it states a cause of action for race discrimination, sex discrimination, or alternatively either, but not a combination of both’ (quoted in Crenshaw 1989: 142). Given that (white) women had previously been hired by General Motors prior to 1964, the case for sex discrimination was rejected. Upon recommending that the case therefore be considered through the lens of race discrimination, and the Black women’s response that this defeats ‘the purpose of their suit since theirs was not purely a race claim’, the Court simply replied:15
The legislative history surrounding Title VII does not indicate that the goal of the statute was to create a new classification of ‘black women’ who would have greater standing than, for example, a black male. The prospect of the creation of new classes of protected minorities, governed only by the mathematical principles of permutation and combination, clearly raises the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora’s box.
As seen in this example, critical race emphasis on intersectionality, therefore, stressed not merely that inequalities are additive (for example, a Black woman being marginalized in terms of being a woman, and in terms of being Black) but rather that different inequalities are constituted and expressed through each other. It is safe to say, therefore, that while CRT has the word ‘race’ in it, as it emerged in critical legal studies, it was not simply about the study of racism as a something that could be studied as a singular, isolated ‘thing’; hence why intersectionality features as one of its defining concepts.
5. The ‘unique voice of color’. The final key tenet sits in an ‘uneasy tension with anti-essentialism’, to the extent that it holds ‘that because of their different histories and experiences with oppression, black, Indian, Asian, and Latino/a writers and thinkers may be able to communicate to their white counterparts matters that the whites are unlikely to know’ (Delgado and Stefancic 2001: 9).16 Through this notion of the ‘unique voice of color’, Delgado and Stefancic (2001: 9) demonstrate that a large part of the classical CRT methodology involved urging ‘black and brown writers to recount their experiences with racism and the legal system and to apply their own unique perspectives to assess law’s master narratives’. This last point is important. Encouraging legal scholars to recount their experiences connects with the Du Boisian tradition of autoethnography, and the belief that autobiography can be an effective mechanism for reflecting on large, social structural relations. This is exactly the point Crenshaw et al. (1995: xix) make when they claim that:
Critical Race Theory’s engagement with the discourse of civil rights reform stemmed directly from our lived experience as students and teachers in the nation’s law schools. We both saw and suffered the concrete consequences that followed from liberal legal thinkers’ failure to address the constrictive role that racial ideology plays in the composition and culture of American institutions, including American law school.
What was so groundbreaking about Delgado and