The Origins of Critical Race Theory

• Pages: 25-38
• Author: Khiara M. Bridges

25

Chapter 1

THE ORIGINS OF CRITICAL

RACE THEORY

The architects of Critical Race Theory have described the theory

as a “left intervention into race discourse and a race intervention into

left discourse.”

1

By this, they are referring to CRT’s emergence in the

late 1980s and the early 1990s as a response to the perceived failures

of two intellectual formations.

On the one hand, those who would come to found CRT were

disappointed with the fact that the consortium of critical thinkers of

the day, the Critical Legal Studies movement (or CLS), seemed

uninterested in thinking about questions of race, racism, and racial

justice. The adherents of CLS—or crits, as they came to be called—

were a largely white, predominately male “collection of neo-Marxist

intellectuals, former New Left activists, ex-counter-culturalists, and

other varieties of oppositionists in law schools.”

2

What united them

3

was an interest in exposing the law’s role in creating, sustaining, and

naturalizing a society that they believed to be woefully oppressive

and alienating. The crits brought an impressive catalogue of

theoretical tools to the task of critiquing the law, including “Marxian

and neo-Marxian social theory, phenomenology, semiotics,

structuralism, post-structuralism and the deconstructive techniques

of post-modern literary criticism.”

4

However, on the whole, they did

not use these tools to think about racial hierarchy and subordination.

CRT ought to be understood as a reaction to CLS’s perceived

bankruptcy in this regard.

And on the other hand, the foremothers and forefathers of CRT

were disappointed with the way that political liberals had come to

conceptualize racism. These incipient critical race theorists felt that

a dissatisfying conservatism had crept into liberal discourse around

1

KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW ET AL., CRITICAL RACE THEORY: THE KEY WRITINGS THAT

FORMED THE MOVEMENT, at xix (1995) [hereinafter CRENSHAW ET AL., CRITICAL RACE

THEORY].

2

Id. at xvii.

3

It might be important to offer the same caveat about CLS that the Introduction

offers about CRT: CLS ought not to be unders tood as a homogeneous intellectual

formation. As one scholar wrote during CLS’s heyday, “Over 150 of us identify

ourselves with the movement, and I suspect that there are about that many positions

among us on any given concrete issue.” Richard Michael Fischl, Some Realism About

Critical Legal Studies, 41 U. MIA. L. REV. 505, 507 (1987).

4

Elizabeth Iglesias, LatCrit Theory: Some Preliminary Notes Towards a

Transatlantic Dialogue, 9 U. MIA. INT’L & COMP. L. REV. 1, 9 (2001).