Critical Race Theory

• Author: KimberlÉ Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendall Thomas
• Pages: 726-728

Page 726

Critical race theory embraces a movement of leftist scholars, most of them scholars of color situated in law schools, whose work challenges the ways in which race and racial power are constructed and represented in American legal culture and more generally in American society. Although critical race theory scholars differ in object, argument, accent, and emphasis, their work is unified by two common interests. The first is to understand how a regime of white supremacy and its subordination of people of color have been maintained in America, and, in particular, to examine the relationship between that social structure and professed ideals such as "the RULE OF LAW " and " EQUAL PROTECTION ". The second is a desire not merely to understand the vexed bond between law and racial power but to change it. Critical race theory scholars share an ethical commitment to human liberation?even as they reject conventional notions of what such a conception means, and often disagree among themselves over the specific directions of change.

Critical race theory expresses deep dissatisfaction with traditional mainstream CIVIL RIGHTS discourse, which has been shaped in terms that exclude radical or fundamental challenges to status quo institutional practices in American society by treating the exercise of racial power as rare and aberrational rather than as systemic and ingrained. In this view, liberal race reform, by reinforcing the basic myths of American meritocracy, has served to legitimize the very social practices?in employment offices and admission departments?that were originally targeted for reform. Critical race theory scholars have drawn important insights from the CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES movement's critique of the role of law in constituting and rationalizing an unjust social order. In particular they agree with critical legal studies scholars in rejecting a traditional view that distinguishes law from politics, holding that politics is open-ended, subjective, discretionary, and ideological, whereas law is determinate, objective, bounded, and neutral. Critical race theory scholars embrace the critical legal studies critique of this view, but they part company with one strand of critical legal studies scholarship that deploys a certain postmodern critique of racial identity to challenge the coherence of any intellectual project centered on race. Critical race theory scholars have framed this particular critique as an attack...