CRITICAL RACE THEORY’S DREAM NARRATIVES – A METHOD FOR AN ANTI-RACIST SOCIAL SCIENCE?

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(03)32002-2
• Date: 01 April 2004
• Pages: 39-77
• Published date: 01 April 2004
• Author: Joshua M Price

CRITICAL RACE THEORY’S DREAM

NARRATIVES – A METHOD FOR AN

ANTI-RACIST SOCIAL SCIENCE?

Joshua M. Price

“I woke up this morning with the after-memory of gnashing, grinding teeth. I

vaguely recall the dream: I’m at a crowded party and the dance is a rumba and

I’m pushed onto the dance floor, but all I could manage was a poor mambo step.

Coffee, 5 a.m. The coffee whizz moves in and I’m ready to think.”

It is a Monday night and I’m speaking to my Critical Race Theory class, which

I’m teaching with the feminist philosopher Mar´

ıa Lugones. I start my lecture by

telling the story of my dream. It’s been a long day and I havea bit of a headache. I’d

like to take a shower. But I’m also excited to lecture on the rhetoric of the critical

race theorists. I am a social scientist by training and so I come to critical race theory

withadifferentformationandadifferentintellectual agenda from most critical race

theorists. Nevertheless, their innovative rhetorical forms have intrigued me since

my first encounter with their work several years earlier. This is my opportunity to

try to put that enthusiasm into words, to account for it, to consider what they are

up to when they use dreams, parables, dialogues, in their writing.

In this paper, after a brief introduction to critical race theory, I offer an account

of the methodology in some of their essays. In particular, I look at how several

critical race theorists use descriptions of their dreams1in their writing. I want to

see if this methodology is one I can use in a non-appropriative way.In other words,

rather than studying their work from a distance, something they themselves would

seem to eschew in their own research and scholarship, I see if I can participate in a

companion project, taking my own dream and my own experiences in discussing

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society,Volume 32, 39–77

© 2004 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1016/S1059-4337(03)32002-2

39

40 JOSHUA M. PRICE

this dream as a way of discussing – and exemplifying – the methodological

innovations of critical race theory.They focus on the law. My aim is to see whether

the methodologies developed by the critical race theorists in order to expose the

nature of white racism can be used to enhance social science methodologies to

study and work against racism. Yet this is verypersonal. In considering how their

work inspires, I also hope it provides a context for discovering the ways in which

a member of the dominant class responds “to the challenge posed by the insight

of the dream, the challenge to take responsibility for who I am and what I do

about my fears” as well as what I hope to become (Lawrence, 1992, p. 2236).

CRITICAL RACE THEORY

Critical race theory is a contemporary legal movement composed of progressive

scholars, primarily people who identify as people of color, who seek to challenge

racism in American society. In their writing, they explore the many ways in

which racism infuses American institutions, popular culture, commonsense

beliefs, pervades interaction and cuts to the core of the American psyche. One

of the central challenges that any person, scholar, activist faces in the U.S. is

the peculiar nature of contemporary discourse on race. Often times, much of white

America treats racism as if it were a thing of the past, an article of a time when

the racial caste system was explicitly upheld and defended, either in the form of

slavery, explicitly racist immigration laws (like the Chinese Exclusion Act), the

Jim Crow laws, or when Native Americans were massacred by Union soldiers.

Contemporary anti-racist work constantly confronts this denial of racism from a

large segment of America.2This denial of racism is one in which many people

seem to have developed something of a psychic investment. Since the critical

race theorists are working in a scholar-activist anti-racist vein, they also have to

confront this massive self-delusion or mythic self-understanding.

The official language of the law is unfortunately not helpful. For most critical

race theorists, the law is responsible for providing a bulwark for racism in

American society. The law has been central in the institutionalization of racism.

Though some critical race theorists see law as a possible remedy for racism (e.g.

Matsuda, 1996), all see law as an untrustworthy tool that has participated in

the past and in the present for much of the highly racialized, and hence racist,

organization of the U.S.

The critical race theorists, moreover, find fault with much legal scholarship.

They find that scholarly discourse generally clouds and confuses the centrality

of the relationship of race to the law. They find this in many disparate realms,

from civil rights law to commercial law, from work on violence against women,

Critical Race Theory’s Dream Narratives 41

to immigration law. Their objection takes several forms. Some object to the

apparently universal voice of legal scholarship which hides embedded political

interests and partial perspectives (Chang, 1993; Lawrence, 1992). This is one of

the strongest objections. Others have studied the way in which white male scholars

have dominated legal scholarship in the realm of civil rights legislation, and that

they may promote ends and remedies that are not in the interest of minority groups

(Delgado, 1984, 1995a). Some critical race theorists find that legal scholars tend to

overemphasize legal remedies to social problems, thereby using a tool that is partly

responsible for the racism and that provides remedies that are misguided or inflict

further harm.

The critical race theorists are heirs in part to legal realism in their trenchant cri-

tiques of formalist accounts of the law (Bell, 1996b). They share in the legal realist

tradition by looking at how the application of the law is in the service of injustice,

whether through exclusionary and invidiously racially-motivated immigration

policy (Delgado, 1996), through the criminalization of African-American women,

or through justifying the unequal distribution of social and economic goods.

For the critical race theorists, outsiders to dominant legal discourse bring

specific privileged insights into legal questions that are valuable but lacking in

dominant discourse (Crenshaw, 1990; Matsuda, 1996). In seeking to bring clarity,

many also break with the distanced, neutral-seeming rhetoric of mainstream legal

discourse. Their innovative devices take a variety of forms. Richard Delgado has

used dialogues between “himself” and a younger, fictional, African-American

law professor named Rodrigo (1995b, 1996). Rodrigo introduces a number of

themes related to law, race, and legal education, including affirmative action

and anti-immigrant legislation, and Rodrigo and Delgado participate in cross-

generational dialogue on these themes. Derrick Bell borrows from science fiction

when he offers a parable of space invaders who offer to cure the U.S. of many

of its problems (fiscal, environmental, and so on) if the U.S. will agree to allow

the space invaders to take its black population (1992). His use of this genre

could be read in part as a thought-experiment to explore how important the

rest of America, especially white America, thinks African Americans are to our

society and our identity. Berta Esperanza Hernandez-Truyol weaves together

history and memory, Spanish and English, in her discussion of immigration law,

identity, and the grounds for a LatCrit feminism (1997, 1998). Margaret Montoya,

Robert Chang, and Patricia Williams paint vivid and sometimes excruciating

pictures of their experiences in law schools, whether as a professor or as a student

(Chang, 1993; Montoya, 1999; Williams, 1991). They use first person accounts to

document the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, language, class, and culture

in their interaction in and outside the classroom. Mari Matsuda uses her own

analysis of her Hawaiian “accent” to launch her study of what she names “accent