Celebrating Critical Race Theory at 20

• Author: Angela Onwuachi-Willig
• Position: Professor of Law, Charles M. and Marion J. Kierscht Scholar, The University of Iowa
• Pages: 01

Professor of Law, Charles M. and Marion J. Kierscht Scholar, The University of Iowa, angela-onwuachi@uiowa.edu. B.A., Grinnell College; J.D., University of Michigan Law School. Thanks to Dean Carolyn Jones of The University of Iowa College of Law for her support of the CRT Speaker Series and to Professors Anthony Alfieri, Lani Guinier, Alex Johnson, Jr., Dorothy Roberts, and Gerald Torres for participating in our lecture series. Additionally, I thank Dean Carolyn Jones, The University of Iowa Office of the Provost, Dean Christopher Edley of the U.C. Berkeley School of Law, Dean Kevin Johnson of the U.C. Davis School of Law, Dean Jeremy Paul of the University of Connecticut School of Law, Dean Beto Juarez of the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, Dean Dennis Lynch of the University of Miami School of Law, and Dean John Attanasio of Southern Methodist University School of Law for their support of the Critical Race Theory 20 Conference/Workshop. Assistant Dean for Finance and Administration Gordon Tribbey, Heidi Van Auken, Mary Sleichter, and my research assistants, Jonathan Brayman, Christie Canales, and Nicole Nellessen, provided invaluable assistance. The University of Denver Sturm College of Law provided amazing assistance with the conference website, and Professors Hillary Sale, Peggie Smith, and Adrien Wing, and many of their research assistants, provided invaluable help with the CRT 20 events. I also thank the editors of the Iowa Journal of Gender, Race, and Justice, especially Michelle Wheelhouse, for their support and assistance. Additionally, I am grateful to the editors of the Iowa Law Review, especially Matt Donnelly and Ashley Powell, for their help and support and for their work in publishing this twentieth-anniversary CRT issue. Finally, I give special thanks to my husband, Jacob Willig-Onwuachi, and our children, Elijah, Bethany, and Solomon, for their constant love and support.

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The year 2009 marks the twentieth anniversary of the first Critical Race Theory (CRT) workshop. On July 8, 1989, more than twenty scholars "who were interested in defining and elaborating on the lived reality of race, and who were open to the aspiration of developing theory" gathered together at a workshop in Madison, Wisconsin.¹ The 1989 workshop, which was spearheaded by Kimberle Crenshaw and organized by her, Neil Gotanda, and Stephanie Phillips, also included as its participants Anita Allen, Taunya Banks, Derrick Bell, Kevin Brown, Paulette Caldwell, John Calmore, Harlon Dalton, Richard Delgado, Linda Greene, Trina Grillo, Isabelle Gunning, Angela Harris, Mari Matsuda, Teresa Miller, Philip T. Nash, Elizabeth Page 1498 Patterson, Benita Ramsey, Robert Suggs, Kendall Thomas, and Patricia Williams.²

In 2008, a committee of relatively junior scholars, including Mario Barnes, Jennifer Chacon, Rose Cuison Villazor, Kaaryn Gustafson, Melissa Murray, Camille Nelson, Catherine Smith, and me, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, as its chair, sought to renew and reinvigorate the discussion started by the pioneering scholars who attended the first workshop in 1989. We planned and organized a conference/workshop entitled "CRT 20: Honoring Our Past, Charting Our Future" to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of these scholars' first historic meeting during the weekend of April 2-4, 2009.³

Our reasons for planning a celebration of the first CRT workshop were vast and varied. The first CRT workshop resulted in the continued growth of an intellectual movement that has made significant contributions to the American and international legal academies. ⁴ The impact of CRT on legal scholarship, law professors, practicing attorneys, law students, and the members of the public whose lives and experiences CRT works to address has been tremendous.⁵ Each one of us has our own stories, both as individuals and as parts of collectives, about CRT's influence in our lives. One of the large influences of CRT has been its demonstration of how scholars can use narrative experiences to reflect upon and challenge legal conditions. ⁶ Given this CRT tradition, it is only natural that I provide my own personal narrative, which reveals one small portion of CRT's impact.

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For me, CRT was a lifeline in law school. In fact, but for CRT, I may have never become a lawyer. Although I came to CRT as part of the second generation (arguably the third⁷) during law school, I had no idea what the scholarly field was when I began to study law in 1994. To be honest, I had no real idea what it meant to be a lawyer. I knew one lawyer in my life-a black municipal-law attorney, who was a friend of one of my high-school history teachers and who hired me and another black student to observe his practice one summer. Despite that one experience, my view of an attorney before I went to law school was that of a civil-rights attorney, namely Thurgood Marshall. ⁸ Also, because an undergraduate professor had encouraged me to become a college professor and then suggested that I at least consider becoming a law professor when I decided to become a lawyer, I also went to law school with the image of a law professor in mind. For these reasons, I imagined myself at the beginning of law school as either a future civil-rights attorney or law professor.

During law school, I would learn that there were many more possible avenues for practicing attorneys, including minority attorneys. Yet, it was not these possibilities, but instead CRT, that would continue to keep me in law school. During my first few days of law school, I felt so alienated, alone, and, according to some, too preoccupied with justice and change that I began to wonder if there was a place for me in the law. It was not until I met a group of 2Ls who were part of a CRT Reading Group that I truly began to see law as a potential professional home for me. It was these 2Ls who introduced me to Professor Derrick Bell's⁹ The Space Traders,¹¹⁰ a fictional tale about the Page 1500 government's decision to accept an offer from aliens to trade all Blacks¹¹ in return for the following:

gold, to bail out the almost bankrupt federal, state, and local governments; special chemicals capable of unpolluting the environment, which was becoming daily more toxic, and restoring it to the pristine state it had been before Western explorers set foot on it; and a totally safe nuclear engine and fuel, to relieve the nation's all-but-depleted supply of fossil fuel.¹²

The Space Traders spoke to my experience as a black woman in the United States, and it helped fill a void of silence about race that seemed to be never-ending during my time in law school. The reading group's discussion of The Space Traders nourished my soul, and I began to think, "There just may be a place for me in the law yet." The CRT Reading Group and its members continued to nourish me throughout my time in law school. Eventually, the group spun into the formation of the Michigan Journal of Race and Law, which has since produced six law professors of color from its founding group, all engaged in scholarship about race and law. ¹³

CRT continued to play a prominent role in my career after law school. As a law clerk, CRT sharpened my analysis, especially of employment-discrimination cases with concepts such as intersectionality¹⁴ and anti- Page 1501 essentialism,¹⁵ and it heightened my understanding of...