Other Crits

• Pages: 121-141
• Author: Khiara M. Bridges

121

Chapter 6

OTHER CRITS

Critical Race Theory has sparked the development of several

other critical approaches to thinking about race and law. Like

LatCrit, many of these “other crits” emerged as responses to early

CRT’s exclusive focus on the subordination of black people in the U.S.

The question that Chapter 5 raises about whether we ought to

understand LatCrit to be analytically distinct from CRT is also

relevant here. That is, there might be uncertainty about whether the

“other crits” that this chapter explores are genres within CRT or,

alternately, are distinct intellectual formations and scholarly

movements. The former might be the better answer. This is simply

because CRT is not a static entity. It can evolve, and it can rectify the

oversights and omissions that were part of the theory at its inception.

Accordingly, we might understand these “other crits” to be

corrections to the myopia that once characterized CRT. If so, then

APACrit, QueerCrit, TribalCrit, ClassCrit, DisCrit, and Critical Race

Feminism ought to be thought of as specific areas of emphasis within

the larger CRT project—as opposed to theories that were merely

inspired by, and are now separate from, CRT.

I. APACrit

As LatCrit coalesced in response to the failure of early CRT to

include Latine people within its analyses of race and racism, Asian

Pacific American Critical Race Theory, or APACrit, coalesced in

response to the failure of early CRT to analyze the experiences of

Asian and Asian American people with racial power in the United

States. APACrit interrogates the racial marginalization that persons

of Asian descent in the U.S. have endured.

1

As explained by Professor

Robert Chang, who first outlined the contours of a program for using

a critical lens to investigate Asian Americans’ lives within the law,

the discrimination that has been directed at Asian Americans in the

past and in the present is “quantitatively and qualitatively different

1

APACrit might be distinct from AsianCrit, which tends to focus on the context

of education when investigating the experiences of people of Asian descent. See, e.g.,

Jon S. Iftikar & Samuel D. Museus, On the Utility of Asian Critical (AsianCrit) Theory

in the Field of Education, 31 INT’L J. QUALITATIVE ST UD. EDUC. 935, 935–36 (2018),

https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2018.1522008 (endeavoring to “provide an overview

of an AsianCrit framework and discuss how its tenets can be used to analyze a range

of Asian American experiences and issues in education” and aiming to show the utility

of the framework “in analyzing this population within US education contexts”).

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OTHER CRITS

Ch. 6

from that suffered by other disempowered groups.”

2

As such, it is

productive to study the particularities of this discrimination. This is

what APACrit sets out to do. APACrit proposes that this endeavor

reveals things not only about Asian Americans, but also about race,

the nation, the “rule of law,” and white domination, more generally.

For example, APACrit scholars have offered incisive analyses of

the internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II.

Professor Gil Gott has observed that we tend to believe that there is

a dichotomy between the domestic and the international.

3

In Gott’s

analysis, the domestic is imagined to be the site of the rule of law—a

place where the Constitution constrains the state. The international,

on the other hand, is imagined to be the site of impunity and raw

power. While this dichotomy may be bad for those unfortunate

enough to reside in the international realm (i.e., “foreigners” might

find themselves subjected to unrestrained power), it is comforting for

those residing in the domestic realm. But, what happens when the

international sphere infiltrates the domestic sphere? What happens

when “foreigners” manage to penetrate the nation’s border? Gott

answers that unrestricted, lawless power reigns down upon them.

This was the Japanese internment.

Gott suggests that the idea and practice of “national security,”

wherein the state is empowered to protect its citizens from “foreign”

threats, destabilizes the dichotomy between the international and

the domestic. “National security” enables the state to deploy lawless

power domestically at any time. This might be especially ominous for

nonwhite people. Writes Professor Elizabeth Iglesias, “The

vulnerability of domestic minorities is particularly apparent given

the fact that race and ‘foreignness’ are so easily conflated in the

master narratives of white supremacy.”

4

However, it might also be

true that one need not be nonwhite to figure as a “foreign” threat.

Continues Iglesias:

[T]hough race is certainly a central feature of the conjured

enemy, national security ideology makes an enemy of

anyone who resists the dominant structure of privilege and

power. The ensuing violations of basic civil rights and

otherwise fundamental legal norms are then justified

through a totalitarian logic in which the struggle for social

justice and political change is recoded and attributed to

2

ROBERT S. CHANG, DISORIENTED: ASIAN AMERICANS, LAW, AND THE NATION-

STATE 45 (1999).

3

Gil Gott, A Tale of New Precedents: Japanese American Internment as Foreign

Affairs Law, 19 B.C. THIRD WORLD L.J. 179 (1998).

4

Elizabeth M. Iglesias, Out of the Shadow: Marking Intersections in and

Between Asian Pacific American Critical Legal Scholarship and Latina/o Critical

Legal Theory, 19 B.C. THIRD WORLD L.J. 349, 361 (1998).