The LatCrit Intervention

• Pages: 101-119
• Author: Khiara M. Bridges

101

Chapter 5

THE LATCRIT INTERVENTION

LatCrit is a mode of enquiry that centers Latine people in the

analysis and critique of law. It is “a movement to articulate the

particularities of Latina/o perspectives and experiences within the

regime of white supremacy.”

1

There is some disagreement about

whether LatCrit is a branch of scholarship that exists within the

larger intellectual project of CRT, or whether it is entirely distinct

from CRT—existing alongside it, but not within it.

2

What is

undisputed, however, is that LatCrit emerged in the mid-1990s as a

response to the failure of early iterations of CRT to theorize the

unique forms of race-based subordination that Latine people

experience.

I. Shortcomings of Early CRT

A. The Black-White Paradigm

Although many nonblack scholars—including Professors Mari

Matsuda, Gerald Torres, and Neil Gotanda—helped to found CRT,

the primary focus of early CRT scholarship was on black people’s

experiences with racism in the U.S.

3

In retrospect, it is clear that

early CRT deployed a black-white paradigm of race in the U.S. This

paradigm understands race relations in the country to consist

entirely of white people’s efforts to dominate black people and black

people’s struggles to free themselves from that domination. Wholly

obscured by the black-white paradigm are the experiences of Asian,

indigenous, and Latine people with race and racial power.

While the myopia that the black-white paradigm induces is

offensive because it erases the histories and present realities of all

1

Elizabe th M. Iglesias, Identity, Democracy, Communicative Power, Inter/

National Labor Rights and the Evolution of LatCrit Theory and Community, 53 U.

MIA. L. REV. 575, 622 (1999).

2

It is worth noting that although there may be some uncertainty about LatCrit’s

relationship to CRT, the primary architects of LatCrit understand it to be distinct from

CRT. Indeed, they have described it as a “ ‘close cousin’ to CRT” that “welcomes CRT,

both in spirit and in the flesh, to its gatherings.” See Francisco Valdes, LatCrit: A

Conceptual Overview, LATCRIT [https://perma.cc/EGU5-XYSJ].

3

Pro fessor Stephanie Phillips, who has been involved in the CRT movement

since its infancy, has argued that early CRT’s failure to consider and theorize forms of

racial subordination that affect nonblack-nonwhite groups was not intentional; it did

not result from a principle that prioritized the experiences of black Americans over all

others. Phillips writes that the exclusion of nonblack-nonwhite groups from early

CRT’s analytical purview simply “was a function of ignorance.” Stephanie L. Phillips,

The Convergence of the Critical Race Theory Workshop with LatCrit Theory: A History,

53 U. MIA. L. REV. 1247, 1252 (1999).

102

THE LATCRIT INTERVENTION

Ch. 5

nonblack racial minorities in the country, it is also damaging because

it results in an incomplete understanding of racism. The black-white

paradigm leads to the conclusion that the mechanisms that have

subordinated black people in the U.S. constitute the entire universe

of techniques of racial exclusion. Thus, the black-white paradigm

leads us to suppose that racism is only antiblack institutions, laws,

and practices: chattel slavery, Jim Crow laws, vagrancy statutes,

convict leasing systems, poll taxes, literacy tests, redlined

neighborhoods, mass incarceration, etc. This limited paradigm

disallows us from seeing the mechanisms that have oppressed Asian,

indigenous, and Latine peoples throughout history. As Professor

Leslie Espinosa writes, racism is also “immigration laws and

internment camps; it is stolen land grants and silenced languages; it

is standardized tests based on standardized culture; it is invisibility

and lost identity.”

4

In critical thinkers’ view, seeing these latter

techniques of exclusion and marginalization—and identifying them

as racism—is important because it allows us to recognize the

multiplicity of practices that have sustained white people at the top

of racial hierarchies in the U.S. and abroad.

LatCrit’s critique of the black-white paradigm also leads us to

complicate our definition of race. The black-white paradigm

encourages us to focus only on black and white people and,

consequently, to conceptualize racial difference as the differences

between those two groups. Thus, we think of racial difference as the

stuff of skin color, hair texture, nose width, lip size, and other

physical attributes. This, in turn, leads us to think of race as

categorizations of humans in terms of differences in skin, hair, noses,

lips, and other physical characteristics.

LatCrit proposes that this definition of race is incomplete. It

suggests that if we free ourselves from the constraints of the black-

white paradigm—and if we think of racial differences as not only

those differences between white and black people, but also those

differences between white and nonblack minorities, like Latine

people—we will expand our understanding of racial difference and

race. For the most part, skin, hair, noses, lips, and other physical

attributes have not been the characteristics that primarily

distinguish white people from Latine people. Instead, language,

accent, immigration status, nationality, and culture have been what

has most differentiated the two groups. Thus, LatCrit suggests that

our definitions of race are incomplete if we allow them to reflect only

physical distinctions. It contends that the nonphysical distinctions

4

Leslie Espinosa & Angela P. Harris, Embracing the Tar Baby: LatCrit Theory

and the Sticky Mess of Race, 85 CALIF. L. REV. 1585, 1593 (1997).