The Racialized Social System. Ali Meghji
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a movement of activist scholarship, but that these conceptual claims could also be taken up in other fields of inquiry beyond legal studies. It just so happened that it was particularly educational scholars in the US who first took to the task of engaging with this legal scholarship in a different field.
After Delgado and Stefancic’s scholarship in legal studies, CRT proliferated in US education studies throughout the 1990s and 2000s. The same year these books were published, Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) wrote a paper entitled ‘Toward a critical race theory of education’, with Solórzano (1997) further opening the field two years later in the paper ‘Images and words that wound: Critical race theory, racial stereotyping, and teacher education’. By this period of the late 1990s, CRT was rapidly growing its own canon in education studies, leading to William Tate’s (1997) review piece ‘Critical race theory and education: History, theory, and implications’. Edited collections on different applicants of CRT in US educational research then became the norm, with a 1998 Special Issue on ‘Critical Race Theory in Education’ in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (Parker et al. 1998), Parker et al. (1999) co-editing Race Is … Race Isn’t: Critical Race Theory and Qualitative Studies in Education,17 Ladson-Billings (2003) editing Critical Race Theory Perspectives on the Social Studies: The Profession, Policies, and Curriculum, and Dixson and Rosseau (2006) co-editing Critical Race Theory: All God’s Children Got a Song.18
While this ‘new wave’ of CRT scholarship was based in educational studies, it was fundamentally shaped by the key tenets of CRT that Delgado and Stefancic formed from its application in legal studies. Take, for instance, Ladson-Billings’ use of CRT in education studies. In her canonical paper ‘Just what is critical race theory, and what’s it doing in a nice field like education?’ she directly applies each of Delgado and Stefancic’s five tenets of CRT to the field of education. Firstly, she draws on the ‘unique voice of color’ in her autobiographical reflections, claiming that this helps because ‘storytelling is a part of critical race theory’and that these stories can help ‘underscore an important point within the critical race theoretical paradigm, i.e. race [still] matters’ (Ladson-Billings 1999: 8). Secondly, she argues that racism is an ‘ordinary’ feature of the educational system which serves the purpose of maintaining the racial status quo. She demonstrates this by focusing on how, for instance, whites have been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action in hiring within educational institutions, and how through biased curricula, teacher stigmatization, biased assessments, residential segregation and unequal school funding, Black folks face a significant deficit in the US education system. While many recast resulting educational inequalities through the lens of cultural racism – arguing that Black people do not care about education – Ladson-Billings (1999) thus stresses the need for counter storytelling: to unearth the structural inequalities in the education system to reject myths of Black inferiority. Indeed, given that even the CRT scholars in legal studies looked at issues like educational segregation, it is no wonder that there was such a synergy between legal and educational CRT scholarship at the turn of the twenty-first century.
What is theoretical about critical race theory?
Despite its emergence as a critical project speaking back against structural racism in two of the major US structures – both law and education – some within the academy were unsure whether the ‘T’ in critical race theory was really warranted. In other words, some doubted whether CRT was really a theory at all. Of course, some of this criticism was levelled by those who were opposed to the overall mission and/or methods of CRT. Scholars like Rubin (1992: 960), for instance, have charged CRT with being circular, claiming that ‘Critical race theory is only a partial subdiscipline; although it is based on distinctive norms, it lacks the distinctive methodology that characterizes critical legal studies or law and economics. It relies on familiar methods of analysis and frames familiar arguments to support its distinctive premises’, while others such as Farber and Sherry (1993: 814) have taken specific issue with the counter storytelling method:
critical race theory has not yet established a comparable empirical foundation. We know of no work on critical race theory that discusses psychological or other social science studies supporting the existence of a voice of color. Most critical race theorists simply postulate the existence of a difference […] One scholar denies that the existence of a distinct voice of color can or need be proven, as it is solely a matter of authorial intent: Those who intend to speak in the voice of color do so […] Thus far, however, there has been no demonstration of how those new perspectives differ from the various perspectives underlying traditional scholarship.
Perhaps the critiques I find more intellectually stimulating, however, are those from scholars who are critical of CRT’s status as a theory, but who remain dedicated to its overall mission and method(s). Indeed, even one of the pioneers of CRT itself – Crenshaw – could be said to be of this ilk when she declares CRT is a verb rather than a noun.19 To such scholars, CRT may be conceived of better as a ‘critical knowledge project’ – in Patricia Hill Collins’ (2019) language – rather than being necessarily a critical social theory. This argument is most explicitly spelled out by Treviño, Harris and Wallace (2008: 9), as we have seen, when they claim that:
CRT has many rigorous concepts and methods, but these have not been coherently integrated in a way that would give CRT the systematic structure – the intellectual architecture – that is representative, and in fact required, of most social theory. What we frequently get with CRT is not a unified theory but a loose hodgepodge of analytic tools that are frequently used in a catch-as-catch-can manner.
Central to Treviño et al.’s argument is that CRT may have a shared ethos built around the shared tenets of counter storytelling, seeing racism as normal and purposeful, intersectionality and so on, but this does not necessarily provide the whole conceptual architecture necessary for CRT to be labelled social theory. This critique, for me, opens up two particular questions. Firstly, why should we care whether something is, or is not, a social theory? Secondly, do we want CRT to be considered social theory? I believe that we can engage with both of these questions by turning to another approach in CRT – and indeed the approach the rest of the book will centre on – which shows the benefits of viewing CRT as social theory: the racialized social system approach.
The racialized social system and practical social theory
Whether or not the majority of people really care about whether or not X is a social theory, social theorists themselves seem to place a lot of emphasis on this question. For at least several decades, for instance, many sociologists have been lamenting a ‘crisis in social theory’, characterized by a lack of theoretical work at the expense of a more positivist empiricism.20 Even sociologists of race have joined in this debate about a supposed crisis of theory. Bonilla-Silva (1997: 465), for instance, claimed that ‘the area of race and ethnic studies lacks a sound theoretical apparatus’, while Winant (2000: 178) stated that ‘the inadequacy of the range of theoretical approaches to race available in sociology at the turn of the twenty-first century is striking’, Feagin (2001: 5) claimed that in race theory ‘we do not as yet have as strongly agreed-upon concepts and well-developed theoretical traditions as we have for class and gender oppression’, and – as aforementioned – Emirbayer and Desmond (2015: 1) went as far as saying ‘there has never been a comprehensive and systematic theory of race’.21
Why does theory matter?
Of course, of interest to these social theorists of race was not merely a scholastic curiosity about what makes a theory a theory. Rather, each of these thinkers believed that theory is needed in the sociology of race because it helps us to do something. As Golash-Boza (2016: 129) aptly puts it: ‘the purpose of a critical theory of race and racism is to move forward our understanding of racial and racist dynamics in ways that bring us closer to the eradication of racial oppression’. As summarized here, the purpose of social theorizing is to help us achieve material change – it is not a chin-stroking exercise that one can do in a vacuum