critical race theory phd

Critical Race Studies

Led by renowned scholars who have influenced law and policy for decades, UCLA Law’s Critical Race Studies Program is the premier setting for studying the intersection of race and the law.

Founding the CRS Program

A brief history of the founding of UCLA Law's Critical Race Studies.

The first law school program in the United States dedicated to critical race theory in legal scholarship and related disciplines, the Critical Race Studies program is unequaled in American legal education. The cornerstone of the program is the CRS specialization , a competitive academic course of study engaging top students who are committed to racial justice scholarship and legal practice. The CRS specialization enhances coursework with a variety of collaborative and interdisciplinary experiences to integrate theory and practice. The Critical Race Studies program hosts an annual symposium that draws top scholars from around the country for discussion of cutting-edge topics and works with student-led clinics to provide students with on-the-ground training and opportunities for representation and advocacy.

Please join our Critical Race Studies mailing list for our latest news and information.

More information about the CRS Symposium and our multimedia archives of past programming.

Intersecting Race and Law

In 2021, CRS launched CRT Forward, an initiative to address the current attacks on Critical Race Theory while also highlighting the past, present, and future contributions of the theory.

The signature event of the CRS program, highlighting strategies to end racial injustice and promoting collaboration across disciplines.

Presenting recordings of past CRS events and symposia.

Combating the effects of mass incarceration on Los Angeles communities

Collaborating with Legal Aid at Work and the Black Worker Center on this employment law clinic serving low-wage workers and members of the center.

Supporting students dedicated to achieving equity for Los Angeles' African American communities.

Sustaining the research and professional development of students pursuing a career in teaching the law.

LaToya Baldwin Clark

Jasleen kohli, ahilan arulanantham, devon w. carbado, kimberlé w. crenshaw, fanna gamal, ariela gross, cheryl i. harris, hiroshi motomura, sunita patel, angela r. riley, lauren van schilfgaarde, noah d. zatz, yvette borja, khaled m. abou el fadl, joseph berra, beth a. colgan, gerloni cotton, scott l. cummings, ingrid eagly, joanna c. schwartz, andrew d. selbst, anna spain bradley, brenda suttonwills, sherod thaxton, tony tolbert, leo trujillo-cox, alicia virani, sanford s. williams, carole e. goldberg, laura e. gómez, gerald lópez, leisy abrego, bryonn bain, matt barreto, keith camacho, mishuana goeman, sarah haley, kelly lytle hernandez, robin d. g. kelley, sherene razack, gary segura, margaret shih, daniel solorzano, shannon speed, abel valenzuela jr., richard yarborough, taifha alexander, crt forward project director, ayda haghighatgoo, crs program coordinator, barbara chen, communications lead, our past faculty directors.

2023-24: LaToya Baldwin Clark

2022-23: Devon W. Carbado, Cheryl I. Harris, and Jerry Kang

2021-22: Noah D. Zatz

2020-21: Laura E. Gómez

2019-20: Laura E. Gómez

2018-19: Laura E. Gómez

2017-18: Cheryl I. Harris

2016-17: Cheryl I. Harris and Noah D. Zatz

2015-16: Chery I. Harris and Devon W. Carbado

2014-15: Cheryl I. Harris

2013-14: Devon W. Carbado

2012-13: Cheryl I. Harris and Jyoti Nanda

2011-12: Cheryl I. Harris and Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

2010-11: Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

2009-10: Kimberlé W. Crenshaw and Russell K. Robinson

2008-09: Jerry Kang

2007-09: Jerry Kang

2006-07: Cheryl I. Harris

2005-06: Cheryl I. Harris

2004-05: Cheryl I. Harris

2003-04: Devon W. Carbado

2002-03: Devon W. Carbado

2001-02: Jerry Kang and Laura E. Gómez

2000-01: Jerry Kang and Laura E. Gómez

Jon Michaels co-writes an article for Slate about local-government efforts that mirror Project 2025

Mary nichols co-writes an opinion piece in the la times about what needs to happen for a zero-emission la olympics, rick hasen is cited in an ap story on voting and proof of citizenship laws.

University of Virginia School of Law

Critical Race Theory (SC)

Information introduction.

Williams, Christopher

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Final Type (if any): None

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Prerequisites: None Concurrencies: None

Exclusive With: Critical Race Theory (9328)

Laptops Allowed: Yes

First Day Attendance Required: Yes

Course Resources: To be announced.

Graduation Requirements

Satisfies Understanding Bias/Racism/Cross-Cultural Competency requirement: Yes

Satisfies Writing Requirement: No

Credits For Prof. Skills Requirement: No

Satisfies Professional Ethics: No

Additional Course Information

Schedule No.: 124219236

Modified Type: ABA Seminar

Cross Listed: No

Waitlist Count: 0

Concentrations: Law, Philosophy, and Humanities , Race and Law

Information reflected on this page was last refreshed at: Tuesday, June 18, 2024 - 9:26 AM *

*During open enrollment periods, live enrollment data may be found in SIS.

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Advanced Critical Race Theory Concepts for Health Equity Research

Have you been using Critical Race Theory (CRT) in your work already? Are your understandings of racism more advanced than those offered in a Racism 101 course? Are you looking for an opportunity to take your CRT-informed empirical research to the next level with a community of co-learners? Join us this summer to learn how to draw on CRT to analyze public health history for perspective on current health problems; design studies and apply the socio-ecological framework or other theories to public health research.

Thursday, June 27, 2024, 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM Friday, June 28, 2024, 8:00 AM - 2:00 PM

In-person only

$2,500 1 Course credit

Thank you for your interest in this course. This course is no longer open for enrollment.  Explore additional RHEDI course offerings that are now available >>

Who should take this course?

• Researchers, postdoctoral fellows and students engaged in health equity research
• Critical race theorists in the humanities and other disciplines seeking to apply CRT/PHCRP empirically
• Diversity, Equity and Inclusion administrators based in schools or programs of public health, medicine, nursing or other health sciences
• Community-based activists and data scientists

Course description

Interest in applying Critical Race Theory (CRT) or its public health extension, Public Health Critical Race Praxis (PHCRP), to research has grown substantially since 2017; however, few opportunities exist for researchers to strengthen their work’s fidelity to these critical race approaches. This interactive course offers an opportunity for researchers who already have an introductory level of familiarity with critical theory, CRT, or PHCRP to advance their understandings of CRT concepts and approaches further and explore applications to health equity research through interactive learning with others who share these goals. Basic knowledge of CRT preferred. 

Participants will take a tour of  CDC Museum , which is across the street from the Emory Rollins School of Public Health. The experience will offer students an additional layer of insight regarding the history and orientation of U.S. public health.

Learning objectives

• Describe two contributions that Public Health Critical Race Praxis (PHCRP) offers Critical Race Theory (CRT) as it originated in Legal Studies.
• Outline a plan to integrate three CRT concepts (e.g., racial consciousness, critical self-reflection) into a proposed study.
• Use the relational dimension of ethnicity to identify a plausible pathway that may link racism to health or healthcare outcomes among ethnically-identified populations.

Questions? Contact us at [email protected]

Berkeley School of Education

Critical studies of race, class, and gender.

Our faculty engage in interdisciplinary analysis to understand the functions, limits, and possibilities of schooling. In particular, race, class, and gender relations are social forces that inform and shape the organization of schools and various educational spaces including formal and informal learning communities. Our faculty also examine the transformative functions of language and literacy keeping in constant view their potential to effect social change and create more just societies. We explore the role of schooling in building and sustaining a democratic society in the face of social inequality, economic restructuring, and changing social relations in the nation-state. Examples include the political activities of students and teachers in and out of school, the pedagogy of radical social movements, the root causes and effects of white supremacy and settler colonialism in education, the knowledge valued as the official curriculum, policies concerning discipline or funding, and disparities between educational contexts and in learning outcomes. Our vision for the cluster has led us to develop the areas of interest listed below.

To find a faculty member who is an expert in the area, click on the titles below.

Critical social and cultural theories.

Patricia Baquedano-López * Lisa García Bedolla Gina Garcia* Kris Gutiérrez * Zeus Leonardo Daniel Perlstein Thomas M. Philip* Derek Van Rheenen Michelle D. Young*

* Faculty available to advise new doctoral students.

Globalization, Immigration, and Migration

Patricia Baquedano-López * Lisa García Bedolla Cati V. de los Ríos Kris Gutiérrez * Glynda Hull * Erin Murphy-Graham * Daniel Perlstein Derek Van Rheenen

Race and Social Inequality in Urban Education

Patricia Baquedano-López * Lisa García Bedolla Travis J. Bristol Kris Gutiérrez * Zeus Leonardo Marcia Linn * Jabari Marhiri Daniel Perlstein Thomas M. Philip* Tesha Sengupta-Iriving* Derek Van Rheenen Frank C. Worrell*

Domination and Resistance across Educational Settings

Patricia Baquedano-López * Lisa García Bedolla Travis J. Bristol Cati V. de los Ríos Gina Garcia* Kris Gutiérrez * Glynda Hull * Zeus Leonardo Daniel Perlstein Derek Van Rheenen

Social Identities in Educational Contexts

Lisa García Bedolla Travis J. Bristol Cati V. de los Ríos Gina Garcia* Kris Gutiérrez * Glynda Hull * Zeus Leonardo Erin Murphy-Graham * Tesha Sengupta-Iriving* Laura Sterponi * Derek Van Rheenen Frank C. Worrell*

* Faculty available to advise new doctoral students.

Language, Literacy, and Digital Media

Patricia Baquedano-López * Lisa García Bedolla Cati V. de los Ríos Kris Gutiérrez * Glynda Hull * Marcia Linn * Laura Sterponi *

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Ph.D. Minor, Critical Race & Postcolonial Studies

Ph.d. minor, critical race and post-colonial studies.

Jointly administered by the Departments of English and American Studies, this minor introduces you to key debates and theories in Critical Race and Postcolonial Studies (CRPS), the interdisciplinary study of the complex process of racialization. Students pursuing the CRPS minor are involved in the current debates and methods of this growing field.

Study in the minor is dedicated to parsing power relationships constituted by webs of social categories (such as race, ethnicity, nation, gender, and sexuality) at multiple degrees of scale, seeking to map the ways power is structured in social relations as well as through the range of categories at play in any given historical context. Work in this field is attentive to questions of material production, class, capital, and power, and is oriented transnationally and diasporically to global histories of indigeneity, colonialism, and empire.

CRPS comprises the cutting-edges of these fields as they have evolved in conversation with each other and with poststructuralist theory, integrating feminist and queer color critique at the turn of the millennium. Today this umbrella offers an interdisciplinary field with a distinctive historiography, methodology, and expanding canon. As an analytical framework, CRPS highlights dynamics of social categories as they relate to power, dedicated to critiques of inequity and exclusion in the U.S. and throughout the world.

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Critical Philosophy of Race

The field that has come to be known as the Critical Philosophy of Race is an amalgamation of philosophical work on race that largely emerged in the late 20th century, though it draws from earlier work. It departs from previous approaches to the question of race that dominated the modern period up until the era of civil rights. Rather than focusing on the legitimacy of the concept of race as a way to characterize human differences, Critical Philosophy of Race approaches the concept with a historical consciousness about its function in legitimating domination and colonialism, engendering a critical approach to race and hence the name of the sub-field. Critical Philosophy of Race has also departed from broadly liberal approaches that have narrowed racism to individual and intentional forms.

Thus, the Critical Philosophy of Race offers a critical analysis of the concept as well as of certain philosophical problematics regarding race. In this approach, it takes inspiration from Critical Legal Studies and the interdisciplinary scholarship in Critical Race Theory, both of which explore the ways in which social ideologies operate covertly in the mainstream formulations of apparently neutral concepts, such as merit or freedom. While borrowing from these approaches, the Critical Philosophy of Race has a distinctive philosophical methodology primarily drawing from critical theory, Marxism, pragmatism, phenomenology, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and hermeneutics, even while subjecting these traditions to critique for their omissions in regard to specifically racial forms of domination and the resultant inadequacy of their conceptual frameworks (Outlaw 1996; Allen 2016; Weheliye 2014; Alcoff 2006).

The main problems addressed by the Critical Philosophy of Race concern the social and historical construction of races, the structural and systemic nature of racist cultures, the relevance of race to formations of selfhood, the mutual constitution of race and class as well as other categories of identity, and the question of how to assess the existing canon of modern philosophy.

1.1 Critical Legal Studies

1.2 critical race theory, 1.3 philosophical influences on cpr, 2.1 multiple racisms, 2.2 revisions of phenomenology, 3.1 race and the self, 3.2 the social construction of race, 3.3 the historical construction of race, 3.4 the cultural construction of race, 3.5 racial identities and whiteness, 3.6 future directions, 4.1 race and class, 4.2 racist cultures, 4.3 racist social sciences, 4.4 racist constructions of women of color, 5.1. doing philosophy differently, 5.2 the revelations of contextualization, 5.3 questioning ‘modernity’ itself, works cited, other important works, other internet resources, related entries, 1. introduction.

Modern European philosophers played a key role in the development of the concept of race as a way to characterize, and rank, differences among human groups (Bernasconi 2018; Valls 2005; Ward and Lott 2002; Bernasconi and Lott 2000). Philosophers in the modern era (roughly from 1600 to 1900) often disagreed on the nature of race, the source of racial differences, and the correlations between race and non-physical characteristics. Kant, Rousseau and Mill, for example, disagreed over the critical issue of whether racial differences were mutable (Kant 2012; Elden and Mendieta 2011; Boxill 2005). Defining race in terms of underlying biological features emerged well after the language of race had become familiar. The biology of race continues to elicit controversy over whether it has explanatory value (Kitcher 2007; Spencer 2015, ; Glasgow et al. 2019).

The Critical Philosophy of Race (CPR) developed in large part as a critique of modern ideas and approaches to both race and proffered solutions to racism. In this, CPR was influenced by the late 20th century developments of Critical Legal Studies (CLS) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) (Unger 2015; Delgado 1995; Delgado and Stefancic 1997; Essed and Goldberg 2002). CLS and CRT were motivated to go beyond questions of formal equality and de jure discrimination to consider the subtle and broad reach of racist ideas and practices throughout social life and institutions, arguing, for example, that norms of neutrality in legal interpretation or reasoning often concealed structural racism.

While borrowing from CLS and CRT, CPR’s distinctive philosophical interests concern the role racialization plays in embodiment, subjectivity, identity formation as well as formations of power and the establishment of meaning. In order to reach beyond Eurocentric philosophical resources CPR has drawn from anti-colonial writings as well as critical work in sociology, history, psychology and other fields that have addressed the topic of race and racism more thoroughly than philosophy (e.g. Mallon and Kelly 2012; Steele 2011; Feagin 2013; Horne 2020).

The influential field of Critical Legal Studies, or CLS, that emerged in the 1970s played an important role in developing new approaches to the study of how the law affects and is affected by social domination. Influenced by some strands in continental philosophy, CLS scholars showed how legal arguments and concepts could covertly support existing power relations (Douzinas 2000). Early CLS scholars such as Duncan Kennedy (2008) and Roberto Magabeira Unger (2015) argued that the pattern of social effects produced by legal decisions indicates that the law is not an impartial arbiter but largely an arm of existing hierarchies.

To see this required new methods of legal analysis that could discern patterns of implicit assumptions operating across the major paradigms of legal reasoning, whether intentionalist, textualist, or originalist. One such assumption is the centrality and legitimacy of stare decisis or judicial precedent. CLS argued for setting precedent aside in order to judge decisions in relation to their often disparate impact on different groups. They argued that these differential impacts were often the result of unexamined assumptions structuring legal argumentation, such as the assumption that responsibility must track conscious intent, or that male power over women is natural, or that equality claims must be based on sameness.

CLS scholars argued that conventions of legal analysis promulgated mystifying ideologies that obscured the law’s social embeddedness and political function. They argued that we need to take a new look at the concepts of liberalism such as rights, neutrality, and freedom to see whether these concepts were as universally applicable as some claimed. Laws and policies based on liberal ideas, such as meritocracy, exacerbated class and racial inequality and injustice. Liberal approaches led to these outcomes because they downplayed differences of history and embodiment and assumed the fungibility of roles such as citizen or rights-holder (Mills 2017).

The emergence of classical liberalism coincided with the development of brutal forms of capitalism, a decrease in women’s property rights, and race-based slavery, colonization, and genocide. Was liberalism simply negligent, or did its central concepts play a role in sanctioning social oppression? Progressives like John Stuart Mill tied the right of self-determination to cultural advance, thus justifying colonial administrations. John Locke’s labor theory of value helped to legitimate the expropriation of indigenous lands on the grounds that many groups relied more on hunting than labor-intensive agriculture. Reading the central arguments of liberalism in light of their diverse impact on different groups raised new questions about liberalism’s relationship to domination.

The work of legal theorist Derrick Bell was key in bringing a CLS approach to the topic of race. Bell developed a series of interpretive arguments focused on the reforms won by civil rights cases to show that the successes were generally contained to those that did not threaten white entitlement (Bell 1987). Corporate elites used the mandate for diversity, for example, as a means to create a diverse managerial class more effective at controlling the broad multi-racial low-paid workforce. When establishing racism required evidence of intentional attitudes or conscious conspiracies, it was all but impossible to redress cross generational wealth disparities based on race or the structural forms of anti-black racism so deeply embedded in such institutions as education, the justice system, health care, housing, and the local, state and national organizations intended to serve democratic representation. Thus, civil rights reforms left racism “firmly entrenched,” as Bell put it (1987, 4). Forced to work with liberal concepts, progressive civil rights legislation ended up providing cover for the continuation of racial divides in housing, wage scales, and education while the criminal justice system has become even more lethal to Black and Brown populations.

CPR also draws from Critical Race Theory, or CRT. Like CLS, CRT scholars have been concerned to critique liberalism as the hegemonic ideology of the West, but they pursue a more interdisciplinary approach. CRT scholars argued that solutions that stay within the bounds of liberalism are insufficient because “racialized power” is embedded “in practices and values which have been shorn of any explicit, formal manifestations of racism” (Delgado 1995, xxix). Moreover, liberals often argue that any form of “race consciousness” is racist, with the result that anti-racist reforms, such as affirmative action or housing subsidies, must prove allegiance to the doctrines of abstract individualism and present race-conscious reforms as temporary deviations from the normative ideals of neutrality. Liberal ideals that imagine individuals abstractly outside of their historical and social context thwart efforts to address the effects of historical legacies on current social relations, property distributions, group welfare and security, and the determination of merit.

In an influential article, CRT scholar Richard Delgado shows that the academic scholarship that pursues anti-racist ends is hobbled by an incapacity in effective self-reflection. In 1984 Delgado set out to find the top twenty law review articles on civil rights—those most often cited, those published in the most well-established journals—and found that all were written by white men. There was an “elaborate minuet” of exclusively internal engagement within this grouping over the best means to move forward on racial justice (1995, 47). Their arguments were strong, but how could it be, Delgado wondered, that even an idea such as having a “withered self-concept” would be best represented in the work of white authors citing other white authors rather than the important work by people of color on the phenomenal effect of racist societies? When he asked the author of one article on this topic why theorists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Kenneth Clark, Frantz Fanon or others were not cited, the author explained that he preferred the source he cited because it was “so elegant.” Criticism directed at the origin of intellectual work continues to be considered a suspect species of ad hominem argument, making concerns about the politics of citation appear illegitimate. Yet can white writing achieve sufficiency in a matter such as self-esteem that involves first person experience? The problem here, from Delgado’s perspective, was that ruling out considerations of social identity in the development of intellectual work diminished the quality of that intellectual work, but in a way that liberal premises could never reveal.

Connected to this has been the ongoing problem of the conceptualization of “merit.” If normal hiring or publications decisions are viewed as generic, without considerations of the social identity of the candidate, then preferential hiring is a deviation from the norm and must meet a high bar to establish even temporary legitimacy. But both CLS and CRT have endeavored to show that merit-based decisions often promulgate implicit racism. Judging which are the top articles by the number of their citations may look to be a neutral standard, but it in fact perpetuates injustice while concealing that injustice.

Critical Philosophy of Race, then, has followed in this critical tradition of considering the varied and subtle forms in which race operates in the development, debate, and assessment of philosophical ideas and arguments. Although many make use of Anglo-American and analytic philosophical approaches, what distinguishes the work in CPR from the general work in philosophy of race is its use of figures and traditions of philosophy in what is sometimes called the “continental” sphere. For example, as will be discussed below, David Theo Goldberg (1993) and Cornel West (1982) have both made productive and creative use of Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and power/knowledge; Lewis Gordon (1995a; 1995b, 2000) and George Yancy (2008) developed new phenomenological approaches to the study of racism by drawing from and building upon the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon; and others have found resources in Jacques Derrida, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Friedrich Nietzsche, Herbert Marcuse, Jurgen Habermas, Martin Heidegger, and Sigmund Freud. To be sure, each of these European continental philosophers exhibited some of the same patterns of racial ignorance rife in the general canon of Western philosophy and have come under critical debate themselves within CPR. Yet the continental tradition paid productive attention to embodiment, socially variable rather than universal modes of perception, the link between power and concept formation, and thus contributed new ways to think about the covert background structures that affect democracy.

Continental philosophy has also begun to critique its own artificially narrow canon and to include more prominently the writings of Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edward Said, Kwame Nkrumah, Gayatri Spivak, and others who were more centrally concerned with, and acutely perceptive about, issues of race.

In a recent innovative move to approach the history of philosophy differently, some CPR scholars are “creolizing” canonical figures to foreground their reception in the colonized world (Gordon and Roberts 2015; Monahan 2017). Rousseau for example had a major influence on Caribbean thought, and reading Rousseau through Fanon, C.L.R. James, and others has produced new interpretive insights as well as new critical dialogues. These “illicit blendings” can bring questions of slavery, colonialism and race into the forefront of discussions that continue to engage the European modern tradition but in new ways (Bernabé et al. 1990). By expanding the sphere of interlocutors in debates over freedom or human dignity, we can also come to engage a wider plurality of philosophical concepts and, in effect, creolize the canon.

To suggest that CPR has a singular methodology would be a mistake: discourse analysis, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology have conducted a famous war against one another, and do not share a methodology. And yet what one finds on this side of the ledger of philosophical discussions of race are a notable body of differences in the topics of analysis; for example, unlike in analytic philosophy of race, there is little attention to the question of whether the category of race is scientifically viable, whether we should eliminate the racial terms, and perhaps regrettably, there is little attention to the debates over concrete policies to redress racism, such as affirmative action or reparations.

In general, Critical Philosophers of Race focus on how race operates in societies, the effects of race at both the structural and phenomenological levels, and the ways in which some forms of resistance to racial systems can be recuperated into sustaining the status quo. Race as a category is subject not so much to biological debate as genealogical analysis, which makes it possible to see how, as Falguni Sheth argues, the central issue is not the fact of the division of human beings into diverse groups, but the identification of racialized peoples as unruly or a priori threats to the body politic (Sheth 2009, 35). Just as Muslims are assumed to be terrorists until proven otherwise, so all non-white groups must prove their right to inclusion, their right to have rights. This suggests a different problematic than a decontextualized approach to the reference of racial concepts.

2. Phenomenologies of Race and Racism

Phenomenology was one of the first philosophical resources that CPR began to use to explore racial effects on experience, subjectivity, and social relations. Although Existentialism and Phenomenology are philosophical approaches founded by European philosophers who tended to ignore race, the questions that these traditions focused on from the beginning, concerning anguish and responsibility, freedom, temporality, and a prefigured social imaginary, have been of profound concern to the development of the Critical Philosophy of Race (Gordon 1995a, 1997; Lee 2014, 2019; Yancy 2008; Ngo 2017).

Edmund Husserl initially developed the phenomenological method as a way to foreground and critique what he called “the natural attitude”: the unexamined background that helps constitute how we experience the world (Husserl 1939 [1973]). The phenomenological method as Husserl imagined it would put this natural attitude in brackets, allowing for the possibility of a greater self-awareness through a transformed mode of interacting with the world. Contemporary phenomenologists are increasingly concerned with the social structures that produce and reinforce natural attitudes as well as with habits of understanding that can render our worlds comforting and predictable (see e.g. Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon 2019). There is also an increased focus on working through the specificity of differently embodied perspectives, or natural attitudes that are correlated to specific group identities. For example, recent work in the phenomenology of race has developed an analysis of the formation of specific first-person experiences within racist societies, such as an experience of fear that feels natural but is caused by racist projections.

In the mid-20 th century, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, and Richard Wright began to consider the ways in which perception, embodiment, relations with others, experiences of one’s temporal existence, as well as the way one conceptualizes the natural and social worlds could all be substantively affected by racial identities, even if this was latent and unarticulated (Sartre 1946 [1948]; Beauvoir 1954 [1999]; Fanon 1952; Wright 1940). Fanon took up the question of black embodiment in anti-black societies, in which one’s actions would be interpreted by others against the backdrop of racist cultural images, curtailing agency and foreclosing individualism as well as the recognition of one as a meaning-making subject. An anticipation of anti-black responses suffuses one’s everyday life. Sartre considered the ways in which colonization had created a situation in which the structural violence of colonizers was obscured and the resistance of the colonized was perceived as irrational. Beauvoir reflected on how her white identity restricted the possibilities of relations with others, reframing the meanings of her intended actions in ways that would reinforce racism. And throughout his novels Wright explored the changed possibilities for self-making that were beginning to emerge for black people with the demise of legal segregation.

Inspired by this work, new existential categories were developed by Lewis Gordon (1995a, 1997), Paget Henry (2000), Robert Birt (1997), Jonathan Judaken (2008), Gertrude James Gonzalez (1997) and others to provide more precise accounts of Black existence in anti-black worlds. For example, there is both invisibility and hyper-visibility: the invisibility of black pain and suffering, now documented in medical research, against the hyper-visibility of black bodies in spaces assumed to be rightfully dominated by whites, which include higher education, government, and institutional leadership of all sorts, now documented by sociologists and social psychologists (Gallagher 1994; Gordon 1995a; Williams 1997). Gordon developed an account of the invisibility of black subjectivity, in which black people become mirrors or empty hulls, mere projections of white needs and desires. White affection for black people is similar to their affection for their pets, he argued, based on the fact that pets do not judge their masters. Black people who go against these expectations to assert their subjectivity and capacity to judge are subject to violence and erasure. Gordon used a phenomenological approach not only to reveal white supremacist attitudes, but also to analyze various black responses to anti-black racism, such as the use of the n-word as a means to deflate its power and divert its original meaning.

Phenomenological approaches to race also helped to disaggregate the experiences of diverse racial identities as well as expose the diverse forms of racism. Liberalism generally defines racism as the result of an illegitimate racial consciousness or racial awareness, in which the race of an individual is noted and taken to be significant, setting aside the question of who is noting who or how the significance is understood. By decontextualizing racism in this way it is rendered a uniform practice that could be philosophically treated in the abstract, with generic solutions. By contrast, phenomenological approaches have suggested that white practices of racial consciousness, among others, need a distinct analysis (Sullivan 2006). White racial consciousness often involves self-attributions of innocence, wilful ignorance about race-related social realities, and a sense of spatial entitlement that Sullivan names “ontological expansiveness.”

While there are some similarities in racist habits—such as forms of group-based antipathy, denigration, and essentialism—there are also differences important in understanding our experiences. The very term “anti-black racism” Gordon developed indicated that his analysis was not meant to be generic but specific, attending to the manifestations of racism that emerge from the specific histories of slavery, Jim Crow, and the ongoing colonization of Africa. Emily Lee and David Haekwon Kim have used phenomenonological approaches to explore the particularities of anti-Asian racism, Asian American assimilation and the idea of Asian-Americans as “model minorities,” in which the natural attitude of whites directs a different set of expectations and normative judgements toward Asians but ones that continue to curtail both individual and collective agency (Kim 2014; Lee 2020).

Even when racism involves a negative projection, there is also always a positive ideal against which the negative projection is identifiable. The criminal black person is contrasted with the compliant black, the lazy Mexican is contrasted with the hard-working Mexican, and so on. For Asian Americans, Kim argues, the natural attitude of whites expects passivity, with the result that nonpassive Asians appear to be seeking dominance, even if their non-passivity is merely sticking “to an unpopular proposal in a committee meeting” (Kim 2020, 297). Asian assertiveness disrupts some people’s comfort and reveals their commitment to the idea that Asians are “socially passive” (ibid). Such attitudes are not caused exclusively by cognitive commitments but operate as affective states that play a formative role in desire as well as understanding, such as the desirability of Asian passivity.

Martin Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, or “being there,” understands temporal and spatial location to be constitutive of subjectivity. This has provided a helpful elucidation of immigrant, bilingual, multilingual, and transnational experiences of identity, such as many Latinx people experience, among others. Dasein’s experience of being at home in the world and being with others in a comfortably collective “we” state is disrupted by angst when the ease of this connectedness is broken by migration and racism. Mariana Ortega makes use of Heidegger’s approach to develop a phenomenology of migrant life, a life in which the experience of at-homeness is never more than fleeting. This experience disrupts the solidity of the natural attitude and can lead to a critical consciousness. European male existentialists sometimes portrayed the self as normally unreflective, with the secure ease of practical functionality within their worlds, until a crisis, such as the Nazi occupation of France, forces reflexivity and a new awareness of what had been taken for granted. Ortega argues that the mestiza and the migrant live in an everyday world of ambiguities, uncertainties of meaning, and contradictory norms of practice, resulting in a discontinuous and multiplicitous self that requires a new phenomenological analysis (Ortega 2016, 50; see also Schutte 2000).

CPR scholars have thus effectively used phenomenology to displace the concept of the normative subject. But to do this, they have also had to critique the early phenomenologists attachment to universalizing human experience. For example, they have shown how particular social conditions, rather than universal ones, create and sustain the possibility of an unreflective consciousness that phenomenologists once took to be the universal default. Non-dominant identities rarely have the privilege of a relaxed absence of self-consciousness. In contrast, dominant groups have not needed to thematize their identity as, for example, white or male (Ngo 2017).

As early as 1944, Sartre began to apply his concept of “bad faith” to anti-Semitism (Sartre 1946 [1948]; Vogt 2003). “Bad faith” is the term Sartre used to describe how one lies to oneself about the constitutive elements of the human condition—most notably, the inevitability of death and the responsibility we must bear for our choices, even those choices constrained by social conditions—as a way to avoid the existential angst this condition produces. “We have here a basic fear of oneself and truth” (Sartre 1946 [1948, 18]). Anti-Semitism works similarly, Sartre argued, by attempting to avoid the necessity of self-creation. The status of the Gentile as constitutionally superior is rendered solid and impermeable no matter what one does because of its contrast with the Jew: every decision the Gentile makes is legitimate, while every decision the Jew makes is corrupt. Anti-Semites are intentionally antagonistic to facts or reasoning that would challenge their view; hence Sartre calls it a form of faith. Gordon took up this idea as the basis for understanding anti-black racism, which is motivated by the desire to maintain the moral goodness and intellectual superiority of whiteness despite any contrary evidence.

The use of the concept of bad faith in this way challenges Husserl’s hopeful view about our ability to critique the natural attitude, given the power of bad faith’s temptations and its intransigence to reason. But in this way, the phenomenological approach to race and racism has helped to reveal racism’s persistence.

The phenomenological approach has also taken up the way in which racial identities and racisms refigure the temporal dimensions of human existence. In line with Ortega, both Edouard Glissant (1989) and Octavio Paz (1950 [1961]) argued that in colonized spaces there can be a plural sense of temporality that takes a distinct form: an experience of the temporality of progress and development put forward by the dominant mainstream alongside a sensation of the static, petrified conditions of the marginalized periphery, creating a fractured sense of one’s temporal context that can lead to ennui. Alia Al-Saji has argued that understanding these diverse temporalities is key to seeing how self-other relations can be short-circuited when the dominant perceive the marginal as existing in a distinct time-space that is “behind” (2013, 2014). This justifies replacing dialogue with pedagogy: explaining to the other how they can advance. The diverse temporalities instituted by colonization, and the subsequent politics of memory they engender and sometimes enforce, is a central theme of decolonial philosophy today, making use of phenomenological work from Fanon, Emmanuel Levinas, and other victims of racism and anti-Semitism to assess the aspects of our natural attitudes still hidden to ourselves. Further, despite the permanence of existential temptations toward rendering oneself as solid and thus secure, in truth, we are always in a state of becoming, with possibilities of playfulness and imaginative self-creation that can lend hope for the battle against racism.

3. The Construction of Racial Identities

In general, Critical Race Philosophers have started with the view, following Alain Locke, that race, even though it is signified by physical attributes, is basically a social kind rather than a natural kind (Harris 1989). Locke wrote: “The best consensus of opinion then seems to be that race is a fact in the social or ethnic sense, that it has been very erroneously associated with race in the physical sense…that it has a vital and significant relation to social culture, and that it must be explained in terms of social and historical causes…” (Locke 1916 [1992, 192]). Locke also alluded to a contradiction still very much relevant to the debate over eliminativism, which is how racial consciousness can be both desirable and dangerous: desirable in that it recognizes social and historical realities, but dangerous in its potential to sanction prejudice and overplay division (Harris 1989, 203).

A central issue in the work of the Critical Philosophy of Race has been how socially instituted categories of race are related to the self. As Charles W. Mills has put it, the assignment of racial identity “influences the socialization one receives, the life-world in which one moves, the experiences one has, the worldview one develops—in short…one’s being and consciousness .” (1998, xv; emphasis in original) Given this, abstract notions of the self that pare away particularities of our identities such as race risk producing theories and norms that tacitly assume whiteness, especially given the white predominance in the philosophical profession.

How, then, should we understand the interaction between social identities and the self? Is it deterministic from the top or more dialectical? In truth, the meanings of race have been influenced by those victimized by racism who collectively organize for resistance and survival in racist regimes. Both individuals and social movements have articulated new ways to think about what it means to have a racial identity (Marcano 2003; Gooding-Williams 1998; Omi and Winant 1986; Taylor 2004, 2016). Any theory of social construction, then, needs to understand this as a complex process with multiple players.

Race itself is a historically and culturally specific aspect of human experience (Gossett 1965; Hannaford 1996; Augstein 1996). Although there are precursors in earlier periods, most believe that the main way the concept of race has been defined in the modern era—as signifying inherited, stable dispositions and capacities linked to physical characteristics—emerged within Europe during its era of global empire. The idea of ranked, permanent human differences motivated or rationalized state policies governing a variety of social protections, inclusions and exclusions, from suffrage to immigration to property rights.

This history may make race appear to be something imposed on the self. The idea that race has been socially constructed is sometimes presented in this way: that external forces have constructed social identities as a way to divide and rank and ultimately exploit and oppress. On this view, while the individual has been categorized and grouped by political systems, with a subsequently curtailed (or magnified) agency, we are still essentially individuals free to engage in self-making.

On this version of social construction, two important ideas follow. The first is that philosophical treatments of the self, moral agency, personal identity, linguistic capacity, normative practices of cognition and so on can be pursued separately from, or prior to, an engagement with questions of social categories of identity such as race. And this accords with standard philosophical practices currently in place. The second implication is that the most liberating approach to race will be to deflate its significance and eliminate it from social life. If it is only contingently related to our identity, and has been used to legitimate discrimination, we should strive to reduce the power of race (Haslanger 2011; Glasgow et al. 2019). Some states, such as France, use such arguments to disallow the gathering of statistics that involve racial as well as ethnic and religious identity.

Theories that take a social constructionist approach to race often understandably focus on the nefarious ways race has been constructed. Yet, by unseating the biological determinist view of race, social constructionist approaches can also instigate reflection on the varied functions of racial terms--to signal collectivity, for example--as well as their open-ended future. Philosophers of race as well as other theorists have put a lot of work into showing how the concept was built on the colonizing ideologies and practices that served economic as well as other ends (Harris 1999; Mills 1997, 2017). But eliminativists about race have to do more than reveal the problematic genealogy of the concept: they also must show that the meaning of race is uniform and eliminating the concept is both possible and desirable.

Critical Philosophers of Race have generally argued that the elimination of race terms will encroach on our ability to retain an effective historical consciousness, which hermeneuticists such as Hans-Georg Gadamer described as central to the capacity to reason well (Gadamer 1975 [2004]). On the hermeneutic view, individuals engage in the work of judgment and interpretation while embedded within particular traditions, but eliminativism could disable the self-reflection this calls for. And for phenomenologists such as Sartre, at least in his later works, the self is the product of a dialectical interaction between the particulars of one’s social situation and the choices one makes as an individual. As Donna-Dale Marcano explains, Sartre’s approach “enables us to explain how and why members of an oppressed group positively assume and create an identity for ourselves” grounded in that group experience: in order to acknowledge the importance of this shared history as well as the forms of resistance that have had a hand in shaping our current social identities (Marcano 2003, 25). The desirability of forgetting this history may vary across groups, since some might wish to forget atrocities that played a role in their family enrichment, while others wish the world to remember the lessons of the past as well as the history of group resistance and survival. If our selves are indeed the product of dialectical engagement, a philosophical treatment of identity and the self will need to incorporate the situated and relational elements that play a significant role in constituting us, and this will include our racialized identities. This approach is not antithetical to a social constructionist theory but one form it can take.

The history of race reveals its fundamentally social origin and many nefarious uses, but not the reach of its dynamism. Although race is an important element in our histories, this does not mean there are no similarities across racial groups, no significant differences within groups, or that racial meanings will remain stable. Yet, still, as Mills emphasizes, race has such a significant impact on our lives it cannot but affect what we know, how we know, and how we understand ourselves in relation to our worlds (Mills 1998).

The social constructionist approach can sometimes lend itself to the idea that societies can bring races into existence simply by the formal use of the category in, for example, official legal documents. This view in turn can give rise to the belief that races can be deconstructed by reversing this process. The historical approach to racial identities offers a different, though not entirely distinct approach. Racial groups exist within history and are formed by historical forces, but these include not only top-down machinations of states but also the collective agency of those so designated. It is not just state policies that construct identities, but social movements, both progressive and reactionary. Through historical periods and collective group action, the meanings of race can change as well as their political valence (Glasgow et al. 2019; Omi and Winant 1986; Alcoff 2015).

W.E.B. Du Bois took a Hegelian approach that understood African peoples in the post-slavery diaspora as engaged in a dialectic process of self-formation in light of their racialized treatment. Slaves had been violently dispossessed of their languages, ethnic cultures and religions as a means of domination and control. Yet, rather than simply assimilating to the Anglo-European culture of North America, black people even under slavery were creatively producing new forms of cultural expression and communal forms of life that gave voice to the sensibilities of their unique and shared historical experience (Du Bois 1903 [1997]). Historical forces had shaped the conditions in which blackness became a feature of the self, albeit a dynamic and variable one.

Similarly, in the southern part of the Western hemisphere, theorists such as José Vasconcelos and José Carlos Mariátegui were articulating specifically racialized forms of social identity with political implications (Vasconcelos 1925 [1997]; Mariátegui 1928 [1993]; Von Vacano 2011). For Vasconcelos, racial identities are the product of both biological and social forces, but racial rankings are simply tools of “imperialistic policy” to generate self-justification (Vasconcelos 1925 [1997, 33]). Vasconcelos was concerned to defend racial mixing, which was a practice widespread in Latin America and also the target of criticism by European intellectuals who justified their own superior ranking on the basis of claims to purity and unified cultural essences. Vasconcelos held that such claims ignore the fact that all races are in a constant process of interaction and mutual influence. Diversification improves humanity, he believed, and will eventually produce a more unified or cosmic race stronger than any “pure” race. Yet, while advocating in this way for mestizahe , or the mixing of races and cultures, Vasconcelos reproduced a new form of racial ranking in which “pure” blacks and Indians were ranked lower than mixed race peoples, or mestizos.

In contrast, Mariátegui criticized the way in which mestizo and criollo elites defined the “problem of the Indian” as a problem of resistance to assimilation. As a forerunner of societies that define themselves today as “plurinational,” Mariátegui argued that political systems needed to recognize the legitimacy of Indian identities and land claims. Indigenous groups in Peru had distinct ideas and practices about how to communally navigate land stewardship, how to practice religion, and how to express aesthetic values, and these practices had produced flourishing communities prior to the Conquest. Indian survival was not predicated on assimilation but on land.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, theorists tended to hold that the Conquest and transatlantic slavery altered and realigned but did not erase prior values, practices, or beliefs (Henry 2000). New group identities carried vestiges of earlier practices and cultural ideas. Liberation from colonialism and emancipation from slavery created new political constituencies who had shared aspirations for new forms of society in which they could chart their own futures. These new constituencies manifested some continuities with the pre-Conquest, pre-slavery past but were also dynamic responses to new conditions and possibilities. For example, while diverse indigenous groups were forcibly realigned by territorial annexations, they responded by developing new group identities that included pan-indigenous identity while maintaining a historical consciousness of their distinct lineage (Jimeno 2014; de la Cadena 2015).

The contrast between political philosophy in Latin American versus Europe is instructive here. The project of Latin American political philosophers such José Martí, Simon Bolivar and Mariátegui was never to create ideal political institutions for any given collection of abstract individuals, but to create workable institutions that could overcome the devastations wrought by colonialism, cultural imperialism, and slavery. This required addressing group differences and group histories. For Mariátegui, the Indians of Peru deserved land rights not as individuals but as specific historical peoples whose land had been stolen. The political philosophy of a nation such as Peru could not then follow liberal theoretical traditions that treated individual citizens as essentially fungible with uniform rights and duties.

This is what fueled Martí’s concern that the Eurocentric universities of Latin America offered no “analysis of elements peculiar to the peoples of America” (Martí 1999, 114). As a result of their European or U.S. based curriculum, “the young go out into the world wearing Yankee or French spectacles, hoping to govern a people they do not know” (ibid). Marti despised the concept of race, held that racism was a sin against humanity, and sought to undo the racism that the Spaniards institutionalized in the colonial era (Schutte 2011). But he also held that new societies must come to understand and address the fact that different groups had distinct histories with their own “vital and individual characteristics of thought and habit…” (Martí, 119) Eurocentric curricula are not universal, but particular, and may have only partial relevance outside Europe. Writing some decades later, the philosopher Leopoldo Zea echoed Martí’s warning and argued that philosophical approaches need to address human and cultural specificity (Zea 1986).

In many post-liberation, post-slavery writings, racial identity began to signify differently than it had for the colonizers: it came to mean group identities and forms of life that had been forged by historical processes involving not only colonialism but also the forms of resistance devised by the colonized. Generic terms like “Black” would change their meanings to signify new group formations whose content or unifying elements referred both to the enforced diaspora as well as new forms of collectivity and resistance. The generic term “Indian” itself denoted a widely diverse set of communities, initially united only in that it was used by settler societies to project negative attributes on all indigenous peoples. In this sense the term had elements very similar to other racial terms. Yet it began to signify something more substantive as well as more positive: a difference of historical experience, values, and practices that cut across many particular differences between indigenous groups. There is ongoing debate today about the validity of such a broad term, but there is agreement that the term “Indian” signifies not only what was done to the peoples it signifies, but broadly shared forms of religiosity, community, and relationality (Teuton 2008; Pratt 2002; Burkhart 2019).

How should we understand the connection between racialized identities and the production of cultures? “Civilizations and peoples are not…coterminous with races,” as Leonard Harris reminds us (Harris 1999, 445). Yet there are links. For Alain Locke, as Harris explains, socially created races can be defined in relation to “beliefs, habits, customs, and informal institutional regulations,” but these are the products of group agency rather than innate: it is civilizations and peoples that decide what traits to encourage given particular historical circumstances (Harris 1999, 444–5). While it is a mistake to see races as causes of cultural formations, it is also a mistake to assume that racialized group histories play no role in the “beliefs, habits, customs” that play a role in surviving adversity, or, on the other hand, in conquering.

Perhaps the most philosophically rich discussion and debate over race and culture came out of the anti-colonial movement that put forward the concept of Negritude in the midst of anti-colonial struggles in Africa and the French Caribbean. Negritude was the name given for the concept of “black culture.” For some theorists, such as Léopold Sédor Senghor, biologically caused racial identities have cultural products that, because of their biological origin, have limited transformational potential. But for other theorists, the production of black culture is essentially to be understood within the history of colonialism (Mosley 1999, 75).

For both Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Negritude was the cultural fruit of the historical process of intellectual cross-fertilization known as métissage . Within this dynamic history, new cultural forms developed that could offer intellectual nourishment to the developing social movements striving for self-determination (Denean Sharpley-Whiting 2003, 117). “For us, the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but to go beyond…It is a new society that we must create, with the help of all our brother slaves, a society rich with all the productive power of modern times, with all the fraternity of olden days” (Césaire 1955 [1972, 31]). Thus, Negritude articulated a new set of norms and values that aimed to depart from Europe’s barbarism. Rejecting colonialism involved turning toward rather than away from the historical tie to indigenous African cultures. This would prove to be a productive relation, since these cultures were neither modern nor liberal by Europe’s lights but communal, cooperative, and anti-capitalist, with their own forms of democracy (Césaire 1955 [1972, 23]). Decolonization required not simply nation-building but a reassessment and realignment of cultural forms and related social ideas about human possibilities (Getachew 2019). Negritude was the name given to this endeavor.

To be sure, Negritude has sustained decades of critical debate concerning the dangers of cultural homogenization (Sealey 2018; Appiah 1992; Wilder 2015; Mosley 1999). Another line of debate concerned the championing of emotion, intuition and myth in indigenous cultures, and whether this only played into the hands of white supremacists. Senghor responded that the point is to redefine the sphere of emotion and the importance of myth as a feature of every society. Du Bois (1903 [1997]) also expressed and affirmed the idea of a specific form of spirituality, inspired in part by Hegel. Eventually these ideas would find resonance in the idea of “soul” as the cultural form of a people, another conception with an indelible racial connotation.

Negritude was motivated by the project Aime Césaire called “disalienation”: to overcome the denigration of Africa and the forced assimilation into the culture of the colonizer (Táíwò 1999). Yet to be clear, disalienation for Césaire did not require a denial of métissage. His own writings were influenced by the French poetry and literature he had imbibed as a student, but Césaire insisted that his project was to “create a new language, one capable of communicating the African heritage” (Césaire 1955 [1972, 67]). In the colonial context of Martinique, the use of French did not need to stop but what was most important was to develop “a new means of expression” that would be “Antillean French, a black French that, while still being French, had a black character” (ibid.). Negritude aimed to allow the expression of a full range of memory, affect, orientation, and sensibilities across the domain of many diverse ethnic, religious, and language communities from which the slaves were kidnapped.

The emphasis on the historical construction of cultural differences and social identities led to diverse conclusions by different theorists. Sartre came to defend the concept of Negritude against its detractors, but his defense portrayed it as a transitional stage in a Hegelian dialectical moment that would lead to a future without racial differences. (Sartre 1948 [1988]; Bernasconi 1995, 2006) Such a future may be one that many anti-racists, people of color among them, aspire to (Williams 1997). But the problem, as Fanon put it, was that Sartre was wielding a universal historical teleology in which sacrifices of collective identification and historical memory were disproportionately distributed (Fanon 1959 [1967]). It is the Black man who must “renounce the pride of his color…[accept] the twilight of his negritude…in order to find the dawn of the universal” (Sartre 1948 [1988, 329]). This formulation maintained the conception of universal humanism held by the French colonizers. Fanon rejected the idea that negritude was simply a stage, and retorted that “It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the Negro who creates negritude” (Fanon 1959 [1967, 47]).

Edouard Glissant took the concept of metissage and applied it to the way in which we approach historical understanding to argue that the danger with historical approaches lies with the assumption of a singular history that unifies us all (Sealey 2020). “One of the most disturbing consequences of colonization could well be this notion of a single History…The struggle against a single History for the cross-fertilization of histories means repossessing both a true sense of one’s time and identity…” (Glissant 1989, 93).

As Kris Sealey argues, homogenized teleologies such as Sartre presumes puts a stranglehold on the political imagination. Yet Fanon and Amilcar Cabral both worried that in some forms Negritude itself downplayed dynamism, internal conflicts, and the heterogeneity of the diasporic experience. Both suggested that the imaginary projections of homogeneous cultural identities based on shared racialization were the product of alienated middle classes seeking an authenticity they had lost. While recognizing that the group specificity of cultural formations and ideas remained vital, they, together with Kwame Nkrumah, held that we need to retain a capacity to develop historically informed critiques of anti-racist philosophies (Nkrumah 1964; Cabral 1973).

If social identities are contextual in relation to social, historical and cultural elements, this extends to what it means to be white. Whiteness across the Americas and Europe varies, since not all began as settler states, and yet the unconscious habits and frameworks inculcated by white or light-skinned persons positioned as superior to all other groups can have some commonalities. No matter one’s individual political and moral commitments, a person from the dominant group will have common experiences across most of their contexts in light of this feature of their social identity.

In his essay, “The Souls of White Folks,” Du Bois considered the effects of a perpetually reinforced idea of natural superiority and dominance on white subjectivity (Du Bois 1940 [1986c]). His concern was the “conditioned reflexes” and “long followed habits” built into customs and folkways (Du Bois 1940 [1986c], 679). The fact that the white poor and white workers were promised well more than they ever received had a profound effect on their resentments as well as their illusions. Du Bois was also interested in how a generic self-regard could be attached to such an insignificant fact as white skin color: what does it do to a man, he asks, to believe that his skin entitles him to ownership of the world? Du Bois claimed an epistemic advantage as a non-white person who can discern the pathological identity complex that afflicts whites. He describes himself as a non-foreigner who lives among them and can view them from an “unusual vantage” so that, as he put it, “I see in and through them.” (Du Bois 1910 [1986b, 923]). This knowledge is terrifying for white people and animates their antipathy: no Emperor wants to share table with those who know he is naked. The habitual practices that ensure white self-regard are largely unconscious, Du Bois suggested, and whites often vigorously resist being made conscious of them.

More recently Charles W. Mills used the concept of the “epistemology of ignorance” to describe habits of knowing that the dominant consciously pursue in order to ensure that they can retain moral self-regard (Mills 1997). Ignorance of the reality of racial domination, and of its illegitimacy, certainly requires more concerted effort in the recent period. One must consciously avoid certain books, courses, films, television shows, newspaper articles, and so on, but one must also attach oneself to certain ideas about objectivity, the irrelevance of genealogy in assessing a claim, and the absoluteness of truth claims that obviate the need for self-reflection. José Medina (2012) has developed this idea further to explore how self-knowledge has been curiously circumscribed in mainstream traditions of epistemology to exclude knowledge of others or knowledge of one’s society. If we are what we are always in relation to others, he argues, then knowledge of others, and of the social conditions we must all inhabit, is a necessary condition of self-knowledge.

Shannon Sullivan (2006) has explored the idea of unconscious habits of whiteness more broadly. Her work has developed some aspects of psychoanalytic theory and pragmatism to explore the common elements of white racial identity formation. This proves a fruitful way to consider how racism can be effectively passed down across generations without conscious intent. Bodily posture toward a person of color who comes to one’s door can convey a whole array of ideas to children without needing to be stated. Sullivan elaborates a host of sometimes unconscious assumptions in white ways of being, involving entitlement, fear, guilt, and other affective states. Sullivan has looked particularly at “lived spatiality”: the way in which diverse groups live their spatiality and understand themselves in relation to specific spaces. Given the “ownership” idea attached to whiteness, and the historical practices of forming settlements in foreign lands, a phenomenological approach to the racialization of lived spatiality can reveal sediments of assumed white privilege that can affect such current issues as gentrification and the reemergence of white nationalism. Some of these habitual practices common to white subjectivity may be formulated as epistemically praiseworthy (for example, aspiring to colorblindness, ignoring history, or the motivation to “discover” unknown lands and make one’s mark upon the world).

The analysis of race and the self, then, includes unconscious habits as well as subjective features produced by collective experience. Yet an important theme of CPR has been an attentiveness to métissage , as well as a defense of mestizahe and the productive creolizations of cultures that have been too little acknowledged. Although clearly marked cultural borders and pure lines of racial descent are praised and pursued by racist social systems, they have never been achieved in reality. Our plural lineages and influences mean that, to some extent, we all operate within what are called pluritopic hermeneutic frameworks, rather than monotopic, homogenous, or coherent hermeneutic frameworks (Mignolo 2012). This fact does not imply that we can go back to taking a universal “we” as a starting point, or some form of abstract individualism. Perhaps we are all pluritopic today, but racialized subjectivity is formed differently vis-à-vis power.

Alain Locke insisted on the fact that “most cultures” have been found to be “highly composite”: “the resultant of the meeting and reciprocal influence of several culture strains, several ethnic contributions. Such facts nullify two of the most prevalent popular and scientific fallacies, the ascription of a total culture to any one ethnic strain, and the interpretation of culture in terms of intrinsic rather than the fusion values of its various constituent elements” (Locke 1924 [1989, 195]). Locke took this feature of cultures to provide a definitive rejoinder to supremacist claims, since the cultural achievements of societies marked by white supremacy bear the influences of subordinated groups.

It remains true, however, that as we saw with Vasconcelos, ideas of mixing can and have co-existed alongside and even supported racism (Bernasconi 2010). The slipperiness of racial meanings and the flexibility of racism requires philosophers to continually assess the contextual conditions within which any given philosophical claim is operating.

4. The Question of Causes: Capitalism or Culture

A central issue of debate in the Critical Philosophy of Race has been how to understand the causes of racism in relation to economic motivations and the system of capitalism as well as cultural forces and social ideology. Orthodox Marxists often sidelined issues of racism, diminishing the struggle against racism as a struggle for bourgeois rights within a legal system that would remain structurally unjust under capitalism. Some thought the focus on racism would divide the working class and weaken solidarity. Despite the weakness of these arguments, it remains true that some anti-racist agendas sideline economic issues and focus on representational equity at the top of the pyramid. This has led to an ongoing debate about how to relate the issue of race with the issue of class (Grosfoguel 2016).

Racism is very profitable. It can work to reduce compensation for jobs designated “unskilled” or “low skilled” because the articulation of “skill” values mental over manual labor and often misrepresents the complex demands of the latter. Racist prejudices incline some to accept the idea without examination that the labor done by racialized groups is unskilled. All manual workers are disrespected and shut out of decision making, but the racial organization of the labor market makes this sector more non-white than other sectors, and in some locations, such as Latin America or South Africa, almost entirely non-white. Racial divisions among workers are regularly exploited by capitalists to diminish solidarity. Neo-colonialism in the global south continues to facilitate the exploitation of labor in countries too desperately poor to negotiate terms very effectively. In truth, then, both national and transnational markets in labor and goods have been racially organized since the Conquest of the Americas for the benefit of elites. Even when the elite class is multi-racial, they benefit from the racist system of organizing and remunerating labor. This is the meaning of the term “racial capitalism” (Robinson 1983; Mills 1997).

Clearly, emerging capitalism made use of the racist ideologies initiated in the early days of colonialism, such as the idea that Native peoples and African peoples exist in an earlier stage of human development and are thus legitimately subject to governance and control by more advanced or developed human cultures (Grosfoguel and Cervantes-Rodríguez 2002; Quijano 2008). Capitalism also profits from the denigration of the value of indigenous cultures around the world, especially when these thwart mining, logging, or other types of resource extraction and the transformation of environments upon which groups depend for their subsistence. On the other hand, some argue that because capitalism has no intrinsic need to respect cultural traditions, it often upends traditions involving racism and sexism when these conflict with its labor needs: for example, the profit motive encourages hiring the best from any group for its professional/managerial and creative teams. One of the prime features of capital markets is their tendency to disrupt existing social conventions. These points have raised debate over whether capitalism is necessarily committed to the maintenance of racism. And further debate has arisen over whether racist ideologies are intrinsic to cultures or to economies, or both.

Most critical theorists of race and ethnicity argue for an expansion beyond economic analyses. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam hold that “While political economy is absolutely essential to any substantive left critique, it is also important to articulate culture and economy together, to conceive of them as existing in and through each other” (2016, 421). In this vein, the cultural theorist Stuart Hall developed what he called a heterodox Marxist approach to race, emphasizing the role of culture in producing the hegemony required to maintain the racial organization of labor (Mills 2010, 186). Yet Hall rejected the idea that culture operates as a sufficient cause or is separable from material conditions (Hall 1980 [2002], 1997a, 1997; Morley and Chen 1996). Hall’s approach to the importance of culture in regard to racism was inspired by 20 th century Marxist theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser and those associated with the Frankfurt School, although these theorists avoided addressing race. Some did address anti-Semitism and the links between the rise of authoritarian societies and the forms of group hatred the Nazi’s promoted, but they wrote little about racism or colonialism (Allen 2016; Farr 2018). Hall suggests however that Gramsci’s origins in southern Italy informed his understanding of how regional ethnic identities could animate prejudice and play a formative role in the crafting of hegemony.

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony focused on the ways in which broad majorities come to accept significant income inequality and diminished democracy, reducing the need for capitalist states to use brute force. Gramsci suggested we must reach beyond economic motives to explain the success of hegemony. To avoid a mono-causal approach to racial domination, Hall adapted three concepts from Gramsci and Althusser: hegemony (the production of cross-class acceptance of social injustice), relative autonomy (for cultural forces that sometimes operate autonomously from profit maximization), and overdetermination (the necessity “to grasp the multiplicity of social determinations in play – and the fact that they work in combination, as an articulation of different forces” [Hall 2017, 90]). For Hall, the significance of this overall approach is to alert us to potential misalignments between causative elements, so that the power of social determinism is understood to have some instability. Further, we can see how non-economic motives can drive the choices of both workers and capitalists. One may be motivated to maintain one’s social position in a racial hierarchy, for example, and to ensure that racial groups considered lesser are not gaining social and economic advantages, even if this compromises one’s ability to fight capital.

However, if we assume that racial identities are epiphenomenal illusions or imaginary in some sense, such motives will fall under the category of false consciousness, in which case race-based motivations will not challenge economic determinism. One’s “real” interests as a worker will continue to lay in opposing racial divisions. As discussed earlier in this entry, the idea that racial concepts are illusory may seem to have good evidentiary grounds. Yet racial categories that operated within the emerging settler states, such as the United States and Australia, distributed significant privileges and protections by race. These included both economic and political rights, including homestead rights, voting rights, and labor rights. In this way, socially created kinds such as racial identities had a powerful social reality: even if some of the ideas about such identities are false, real historical events produced shared experiences and shared sets of interests (Beltrán 2020).

The fact that racial groups are led to compete with one another for economic advantages is itself socially engineered rather than natural, but it may have heterogeneous causes. The concept of overdetermination allows us to expand the concept of what is in one’s rational “interest” to include pride and self-regard, group self-affirmation, relational advantage over other groups, the desire to enact domination and to protect longstanding special entitlements. Is the imbrication of this complex array of motives such that we should see the economic as the main determinant, operating behind what look to be identity-protections? In other words, are racist motives ultimately caused by a choice structure crafted by capitalists?

Some argue that the structural racism of modern European societies (and European-based societies such as the United States) is deeply embedded in their cultures and languages in ways that are concealed by their espousal of classical liberalism’s dominant concepts of individualism, equality, and freedom (Goldberg 1993, pp. 6–7; see also Mills 2017). It is liberalism that espouses neutrality and color-blindness as ideal norms for social interaction, leading to an unwillingness to engage with racial realities in social institutions and economic outcomes. David Theo Goldberg argues that liberal cultures are racist in taking difference to be a problem requiring assimilation, integration, and “normalization” in Foucault’s sense of a comparative ranking that justifies forcible conformity. People of color and non-European immigrants who reject the color-blind ideal are seen as not yet assimilated into advanced, modern ways of life, and thus incapable of self-governance. Every articulation of anti-racist rage and rebellion can then be cast aside as based in ignorance. If these groups knew how to work within liberal democratic institutions and educational systems, some believe, they would be faring better with no need to rebel. In a sense, then, the suffering of nonwhites is viewed as self-caused by their inferior cultures, leading to a hegemonic acceptance of social inequality. The liberal view, as opposed to the conservative view, is distinguished only in that it sees this deficiency as remediable with assimilation.

A key element of Goldberg’s approach is to highlight the malleability of racial and racist discourses: just as liberalism has morphed into neo-liberalism, with its emphasis on self-maximizing strategies, individual responsibility, and punitive attitudes toward those who cannot effectively monetize their talents, so old-school biological racism morphs into cultural racism: the problem is not nonwhite genes but nonwhite cultures. Against those who take race to simply mean biology, Goldberg holds that the language of race can continue its noxious effects without any recourse to “biological reference” (1993, 11). Goldberg proposes that the West is made up of racist cultures so deeply committed to racism that new forms emerge as soon as old ones lose their power. Cultures are inherently dynamic, counseling against a metaphysically inclined pessimism, but the dynamism and plasticity of racism requires permanent vigilance.

Goldberg and Cornel West have independently made use of the Foucauldian concepts such as “fields of discourse” and “epistemes” to suggest that racial ideas are reinforced by loose coherence relations without logical entailments or causal determinism (West 1982). Familiar ways of organizing and achieving knowledge—such as classification tables—resonate across quite different disciplines and projects and help to guide, and control, the formulation of intelligible objects and problematics. Human differences, West suggests, were mapped in the 18th and 19th centuries via small visual variations to resonate with the ways in which botanists organized typologies of flora and fauna, as if such mapping constituted knowledge.

Despite their variety, racist cultures tend to portray racial identities and racism as natural in a way that obscures their historical construction. Although the 19th century theories and practices in regard to race have been discredited and largely rejected, the ways in which race is approached today in both the social and natural sciences retain some continuity with these problematic histories, with disturbing effects: “The scientific cloak of racial knowledge, its formal character and seeming universality, imparts authority and legitimation to it” (Goldberg 1993, 149).

Foucault’s focus was on the ways in which knowledge projects are framed, confining those so defined “within the constraints of the representational limits” (Goldberg 1993, 152). Such projects have typically assumed that the most important goals are uplift, assimilation, and integration with whites rather than extending democracy or reformulating justice (Shelby 2018). Knowledge projects are themselves conducted in ways that can exacerbate epistemic injustice: “The Other, as object of study, may be employed but only as informant, as representative translator of culture” (Goldberg 1993, 150; see also Narayan 1997 and Bayruns Garcia 2019). Concepts in use today such as “ghettos,” “ganglands,” “inner cities,” “underclass,” and “puppet governments” operate in a similar manner as older concepts like “savages,” “primitives,” and “barbarians” to reify and naturalize peoples, neighborhoods, and cultures (Goldberg 1993, 152–155).

Resonating effects between the new language and the old does more than support their plausibility, as Goldberg points out: “noncontroversial meanings [of terms such as ‘inner city’ or ‘underclass’] offer to their racialized ones the aura of respectability, just as their racial connotations spill over silently, unself-consciously, and so unproblematically into their racialized ones” (1993, 155). New meanings for old terms can emerge as needed by new contexts and new social projects, but with persistently problematic connotations. The concept of the “primitive” was originally intended to refer to ancient social groups from which contemporary human societies are descended; only later did it become a synonym for the racially other and the culturally “backward”. In this case the meaning remained stable while the referent group shifted. Ancient social groups that were nomadic, polygamous, and communal rather than individualist were then tagged onto nonwhite groups that exist today, such as indigenous groups in Africa and Latin America.

Both CPR and CRT scholars have shown how a significant amount of social science research has been functional for the state, with dubious results: providing information, data, statistical regularities that are used to formulate state policies; assuming frameworks that overlook agency and divert attention from considerations of justice (Murakawa 2014; Shelby 2018; Bauman 2003; Darby and Rury 2018). Statistics gathering on recidivism rates correlated to race are still used in parole decisions, as if recidivism is a natural fact or caused by bad individual choices rather than inadequate social services and prejudicial labor markets. In this way social science continues to participate in the construction of social ontologies, such as “likely repeat offender,” through feedback loops between representation and reality. Social sciences can then represent racial Others in an ostensibly neutral way while protecting white dominance (Goldberg 1993, 174).

To believe that we simply need to find more politically correct alternatives for terms like “underclass” or “primitive” is to assume that the object of reference can be defined and demarcated within racist cultures outside of a racist linguistic system. If we understand racism to be infecting the delimitation of fields of knowledge and the formation of objects as well as associated meanings, then the task must be to critically assess cultures, discourses, and institutions at every level. The project of inquiry then becomes one of understanding how racial domination has been reproduced across generations, encompassing political sensibilities from conservatism to liberalism.

Goldberg’s approach may be interpreted by some as a postmodern approach that has gone too far in conferring sufficient causality to language or discourse (see e.g. Mills’ critique of Hall, 2010, on this same point). Yet both Goldberg and Hall continually emphasize material structures alongside linguistic and discursive ones. There remains the question of how to understand the relation between these various aspects of racist cultures. The question of whether there are ultimate or sufficient causes, however, does not animate Goldberg’s work. His goal is to unearth the cultural and discursive elements involved in the constitution, perpetuation, and fluid transformations of racist concepts and racist societies. We need to understand the constitutive discourses operating in the social sciences to grasp how it can be the case that they “have done much to create, authorize, legitimate, and extend both the figures of the racial Otherness and the exclusion of various racisms” (Goldberg 1993, 175).

Other philosophers who analyze the social sciences have also offered a strong critique of existing frameworks and policy approaches (esp. Darby and Rury 2018 meant; Shelby 2018). Tommie Shelby critiques mainstream work on racial poverty in the social sciences for downplaying the agency of the poor as well as the rationality and moral reasoning that can motivate decisions to self-segregate, for example, or, at times, to resist certain kinds of wage labor. Ghetto poverty is caused by macro structural forces, but the collection of individuals forced into these spaces are actively endeavoring to survive, to occasionally flourish, and also to foment resistance of one sort or another. We cannot explain their choices by their culture (as in the “culture of poverty” thesis) but by their choice situation. We also need frameworks that allow theorists to see the creative and assertive responses devised by collective effort (the assertiveness of rap, for example, that re-describes social worlds against dominant misrepresentations). Shelby no less than Goldberg takes apart the linguistic apparatus that produces a large body of social science functional for racial capitalism. And his use of what is a usually denigrating term – “ghetto” – may be seen as an instance of what Goldberg calls “standing inside the terms” as a means to transform and redirect their political effects (1993, 174).

Critical philosophers of race, even those influenced by postmodernism, tend to set limits on the plasticity of linguistic transformation. Goldberg suggests that those designated by the term “primitive,” such as indigenous groups, “are rarely in a position of power, politically and technologically, to take on the category as a form of self-reference, even should they choose to” (1993, 174). Speech, however constitutive its reach, exists in a material world.

Critical race feminist philosophers have developed a critical analysis of the ways in which categories such as “Black women” as well as “women of the global south” have been constituted as an academic object of study and analysis (Narayan 1997; Khader 2011, 2018; duCille 1997). Uma Narayan argued that representations of women in India reproduce naturalistic frames and global hierarchies that devised a version of the culture of poverty thesis on an international scale. Notably, violence against women in the global north is not generally given cultural explanations but portrayed as a problem of individual pathology or an undifferentiated misogyny that operates outside of specific histories and contexts. By contrast, women of the global south are portrayed as oppressed by their cultures and religions.

Serene Khader expands on this analysis to show how culturalist explanations result in underestimating the agency of women in the global south, creating the view that their agency is only possible when they completely reject their religion or culture. This is a problem not only in the social sciences but also in postmodern feminist theory, and it occludes possibilities of universalist feminism because the oppressed Third World woman constructed in this way requires uplift, not dialogic engagements in which there might develop a larger understanding of the complex nature of sexism as well as the multiple possibilities of liberation from sexism. In some writings, the Third World woman is reified to such a degree that no serious political engagement about how to formulate shared feminist aims is possible.

Khader develops an approach to adaptive preferences that allows for non-ideal and historically attuned assessments of choices in any given context. All gendered individuals in reality make choices within structured environments. Outsiders to these environments tend to misdiagnose women’s choices, viewing them as accepting of oppression when in truth they may be efforts at self-protection. Mistaken analyses can also occur when cultures are reified as static; if we drop this idea Khader suggests we can judge choices based on their potential for transitions. For example, covering can enable women to venture out of the home without risk, and lead to changed public spheres. She argues for an approach that attends to contextual conditions of all sorts – material and cultural – for understanding oppression and gauging effective resistance. Contextualization will yield pluralist rather than uniform notions of liberation from gender-based oppression, and Western feminists need to be open to a multiplicity of liberatory forms even including certain kinds of gender-based divisions of labor.

Ann duCille takes a critical look at how the category “Black women” has been constructed within postmodernism, as well as other radical theoretical platforms. It is problematic to take Black women as the quintessential Other or the paradigm of difference (duCille 1997; Davidson 2010). Black women can be epistemically privileged in a way that does not reify their otherness, concealing its contextualization and internal variability. Maria del Guadalupe Davidson takes up duCille’s challenge to rethink the category by drawing from Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “the fold” as an alternative approach to identity and subjectivity. This presents an approach to subjectivity as constitutively relational. If theorists will focus on activity and relationality, rather than being, we may be able to specify unique conditions of Black women without reification (Davidson, 2010, 128–130).

Debates continue about how to formulate racial identities as well as whether identity-based movements have overshadowed class-based movements. Shohat and Stam explain that the focus on identity should be seen against the backdrop of a larger project of global decolonization, rather than assumed to be forever complicit with neo-liberalism (2016). The point is not to replace the frame of class struggle, but to complicate it, bringing ongoing forms of cultural imperialism to the center of analysis, so that we can begin to discern the “multiaxial forms of resistance and struggle” that face down “multiaxial forms of oppression…shaping new social actors, new vocabularies, and new strategies.” (2016, 421)

5. Reconstituting the History of Philosophy

The racist beliefs of major figures in the traditional canon of modern philosophy went unexplored until the second half of the 20 th century. Most historians of philosophy assumed that canonical figures were simply men of their time, and that their racism was devoid of philosophical interest and significance. Critical race philosophers have opened up debate on these issues, such as how the racism of important philosophers such as Locke and Kant may require us to reassess standardly generous interpretations of their political and ethical views (Zack 2017; Taylor et al. 2018; Mills 2017; Bernasconi and Mann 2005). They have also argued that bringing racism to the fore will require changing the standard ways of doing the history of philosophy.

First, a change in interpretive methods is in order, to change the way in which we read canonical texts. Before we assume that the racism of a given philosopher was typical of their day, we need to explore the historical context and consider the written views of his or her contemporaries so that we can reasonably assess what any given philosopher “could or should have known” about, for example, slavery (Bernasconi 2018, 3). In fact, as recent work has shown, throughout the modern period, slavery and colonialism were subject to vigorous debates both by those inside and outside of imperial nations (Jeffers 2018; Valls 2005; Mehta 1999; Pitts 2006; Dussel 2018, 2013; Mosley 2017). A thorough examination of the intellectual scene in which canonical philosophers were ensconced raises new questions about their views and assumptions (Bernasconi and Mann 2005; Ward and Lott 2002). But such an examination requires that we contextualize philosophical texts historically and socially before we can justify our interpretations.

Second, the existing canon has too many omissions on crucial issues, especially in regard to moral and political debate, to be taken as sufficient unto itself, given that such topics as slavery were extensively discussed and debated by other theorists in the same time period. The question of how to expand, if not reconstitute, the canon of modern philosophy has generated debate over what constitutes “philosophical” writings as opposed to other sorts. It is important to remember that the canon of modern European philosophers does not include only professional philosophers working within universities: such professionals did not even appear until the beginning of the 19 th century. And the issue of what makes a text count as a philosophical argument is of course subject to further debate. Many of the already accepted canonical European texts come in the form of letters, memoirs, fiction, dialogues, interpretations of sacred writings, and journalistic essays. Think of Augustine’s Confessions, Thomas More’s Utopia, Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion, Pascal’s Pensees, The Federalist Papers, Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, or Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Philosophers read texts in a philosophical manner even when the text itself is not written in the form of a logically ordered argument.

There is original philosophical work in Africana, Latin American, indigenous and other traditions on metaphysics, morality, aesthetics and a whole host of philosophical issues that should become part of a revised canon (Jeffers 2018; Henry 2000; Dussel 2013, 2018; Wiredu 2004; Maffie 2013). The existence of original philosophical work in ancient China and India is not as contested, yet these sources are also absent representation in many so-called “top” graduate programs. Hence, there is an unjustificable Eurocentrism in the existing canon’s formation. The question of whether a given work counts as philosophy cannot be decided upon by a priori criteria created by a foreshortened canon. Therefore, we need to engage in both critical and reconstructive work on the question of canonicity itself.

The third point follows from the last. The traditional canon is not only insufficient but problematic in ways that require new analyses and interpretations. Without doing this critical work, taking concepts developed within modern Western political philosophy as the foundation from which to build further theories of social justice may result in extending the life of racist ideas and failing in our anti-racist aims (Mills 1998; Gines 2014; Basevich 2020; Zack 2017; Taylor et al. 2018). Concepts that look to be neutral on issues of race may have racist effects even without racist motivations, such as the labor theory of value that excuses the appropriation of lands from indigenous groups, or concepts of equality that may be formulated in a way that assumes sameness, or ontologies of the self that obscure relationality and dependence on hierarchical social infrastructures. Thus, it is not merely that the traditional canon needs to be augmented: it needs a thorough critical analysis that puts ideas and concepts in their historical context, explores their real-world applications, and then considers the reasons for their influence and popularity vis-à-vis other possible positions available at the time or, frankly, even now.

To reiterate, a historical and cultural contextualization of philosophical ideas is perhaps the most crucial methodological reform needed to change the way we understand the history of philosophy, and contextualization is just as important in regard to present day work as for philosophy written in the distant past. Contemporary approaches to philosophical historiography have sometimes assumed that contextualization is unnecessary, but this assumption, left unchallenged, can constrain critical analysis. When traditional historians of philosophy have begun to engage with questions of race, the problematics have sometimes been foreshortened by decontextualized methods of analysis. In this vein, Robert Bernasconi argues that naturalistic tendencies in analytic philosophy have overemphasized the question of whether a given philosopher believed in race as a natural kind, resulting in a limited interpretive exploration (2012, 552–553).

Take, for example, Du Bois’s rich 1899 [1986a] text “The Conservation of Races” where he elaborates an account of African Americans as a distinct historical people. Du Bois’s account was reduced in a number of contemporary critical essays to the question of whether he meant “black” to refer to biology, in which biological concepts themselves were understood as free of culture. But from phenomenology’s point of view, the philosophical conceptualization of nature, and the current political uses made of naturalist claims, are themselves cultural artifacts, historically and culturally contingent. Thus, when we read the history of modern European philosophy, we need to be alive to the ways in which “nature” is being socially constructed and conscripted for philosophical projects.

CPR has worked to advance new interpretations of canonical philosophers but has also, at the meta-level, contested standard approaches to interpretation. The interpretation of Kant, for example, has had to contend with his extensive writings on anthropology and geography in which he espoused unambiguously racist claims (Elden and Mendieta 2011; Kant 1798 [2012]). Until recently this large body of writings was considered irrelevant to the understanding of Kant’s ethics or his cosmopolitanism on the grounds of disciplinary distinctions between philosophical work and other writings. But why ignore Kant’s writings about the nature of human difference if we are trying to understand his actual views about the way peoples should interact? Like feminist philosophers who developed an analysis of the subtle ways in which some moral theories assumed a male embodiment, Critical Philosophers of Race have shown that doctrines of self-determination and universal reciprocity developed by modern European philosophers were never intended to apply to all groups: the right to autonomy was based on certain capacities that legitimated the exclusion of children, the disabled, and usually women, but, also, non-Europeans who were viewed as developmentally “behind”. Taking some aspect of a philosophers’ view and giving it the most generous reading possible distorts our understanding of modern philosophy and its conceptual offerings (Basevich 2020; Shorter-Bourhanou forthcoming; Kirkland 2018).

Mills argues that the only way to make sense of the evident contradictions in modern European philosophy is to understand this body of work as distinguishing types of selves among the human race (Mills 1998). Because of these type-differences, anti-authoritarian reforms and demands for democracy were never meant to be extended to the colonies. Sub-persons (women, slaves, the members of inferior cultures) did not merit suffrage, freedom, consultation, or self-determination. There was debate over whether these groups would remain forever inferior, less than human, or whether they might advance (Boxill 2005). But even those, like Rousseau, who believed in the possibility of uplift, assumed that “persons” would be the ones showing “sub-persons” the way forward, and judging their progress.

Lucius Outlaw characterizes modern European philosophers as sharing a commitment to a “project of modernity” that aimed to put all human activity “under the aegis of ‘reason’” (1996, 147; see also Kirkland 2018; Yancy 2020; Dussel 1995, 2013, 2018; McCarthy 2009; Mehta 1999). Despite a diversity of approaches and disagreements, the modern Europeans shared a distinctive philosophy of history that defined progress as the expansion of freedom and rationality. Social institutions and cultures could then be compared and ranked in regard to this singular metric of universal development. It was useful for Empire, as Outlaw argues, to reframe the wide expanse of alterity among human beings and cultures as developmental differences. The possibilities of a true pluralism was then foreclosed by norms of modernity. The unfortunate result still with us is that the impetus to study current social and cultural differences in thought, or the variety of philosophical writings, is diminished on the grounds that these constitute inessential and accidental aspects of the human condition, irrelevant to the formulation or discernment of freedom and reason. Eurocentrism in philosophical curricula is then no accident, Outlaw concludes, nor is it viewed as a deficiency since the modern European canon is assumed to provide sufficient elaboration and debate over the universal principles of freedom and reason.

Thus, this project of modernity gave birth to a “false universalism that blocks the appreciation of racial and ethnic differences…and contributed to deceptions that masked various forms of domination that were rationalized…” (Outlaw 1996, 150). Critical social theory worthy of the name needs to embrace a pluralism of philosophical projects, concepts, and frameworks that have arisen from differently situated thinkers from diverse regions or group experiences who are addressing, at least in some cases, dissimilar puzzles and challenges. A pluralist approach to philosophical projects can then engage in critical dialogue across these differences. The point of noting real philosophical alterities for Outlaw is not to counsel empty tolerance but to avoid presumptive judgments based on putative universals crafted by only one side.

Questioning European projects of modernity has been productively disruptive of the staid problematics that have dominated numerous sub-fields, from political philosophy to aesthetics to epistemology (Narayan and Harding 2000; Dotson 2012, 2014; Taylor 2016). Previously, the focal points that dominated these sub-fields, such as skepticism, ideal forms of justice, the universal nature of aesthetic value, and so on, came exclusively from modern European or ancient Greek philosophers. The recent critical work is challenging the hegemony of the traditional canon in setting out the agenda for philosophy. To be sure, previous movements in philosophy have also made progress in expanding the problematics, such as pragmatism, post-structuralism, social epistemology, feminist philosophy, and others. New questions have made it to the table, and old questions have had new formulations.

Particularly important has been the transformation of political problematics, reaching well beyond the debates over liberalism, conservatism, and Marxism (McGary 1999; Cohen 1999, Gooding-Williams 2009; Shelby 2018; Lugones 2003; Corlett 2003 and 2010; Darby and Rury 2018; Hanchard 2018). The move from ideal to non-ideal approaches has played a particularly productive role in opening up the field of political philosophy to engage with racial injustice and inequality (Mills 2005). Non-ideal approaches have cast new light on ideal conceptions of normative, optimally functional behavior. Shelby, Gooding-Williams, and Cathy Cohen have all, in different ways, turned to the project of investigating “how [so-called] deviant practices can be transformed into political challenges to the power that the state exercises over the ghetto poor through the promotion and enforcement of [illegitimate] norms” (Gooding-Williams 2009, 251). Gooding-Williams indicts Du Bois’s adoption of mainstream norms of respectability in his account of the Philadelphia ghettos and suggests that we look instead to Frederick Douglas as the better political philosopher for emancipation (see also James 1997). The project of civilizing Black people was a strategy that would only ensure their subjection. Douglas envisioned a subaltern black counterpublic that might have its own distinct ideas about the optimal norms of communal life and what constituted civilized behavior (see Dawson 2011).

These new problematics in political philosophy often draw from neglected historical sources, including Douglass and Du Bois as well as Martin Delaney, Anna Julia Cooper, Simon Bolivar, Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, Walter Rodney, Haya de la Torre, Jose Martí, Aimé and Suzanne Cesaire, Edouard Glissant, and many others. Related to these new non-European sources has been an altered map of the European sources of greatest interest, to include more of Montaigne, Las Casas, Condorcet, Rousseau, Gramsci, Marcuse, and others.

To be sure, many Critical Philosophers of Race decline to follow Outlaw in believing that there is a ‘black counterpublic’ that represents a racially cohesive formation. To the extent there is cohesion, it is based more on opposition to white supremacy, some argue, than an expression of shared sensibilities and orientations. And so the debate ensues. As this entry has shown, strong differences abound among CPR scholars over the history of Negritude and metissage , the implications of intersectionality, the meaning and future of racial concepts, and the weighty role of capitalism as a causal factor. A newly interpreted, reorganized and expanded history of philosophy is reformulating our central questions in many sub-fields, invigorating new lines of argumentation, more relevant for current challenges.

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• v.28(Suppl 1); 2018

Editorial: Critical Race Theory: Why Should We Care about Applying It in our Research?

Luisa n. borrell.

Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics; Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy; City University of New York; New York, NY

Race and Racism Today

While race has been always with us in the United States, the concept of race has been shaped by the political and scientific beliefs of the social fabric of our society throughout history. Thus, the past two years have provided a unique context for race, racism and race relationships in the United States. Indeed, President Donald J. Trump and his administration have brought race into our everyday life at alarming levels - whether through rhetoric against football players calling attention to social justice, 1 the suggestion that White supremacists at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia were “very fine people,” 2 or the name calling of Mexican Americans – bad hombres, rapists, drug dealers or animals 3 – just a few of the everyday examples the nation endures through the now-famous tweets of the day. Evidence suggests that the divisiveness characterizing Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the constancy of his disparaging remarks about anyone who disagrees with his agenda or discourse is already having adverse mental health effects. 4 All of these add up to direct and indirect tolls on the nation’s health, especially for those of us for whom race is part of our ascribed and/or self-identity. 4 As scientists, we must be responsibly conscious of finding ways to design research studies and produce solid evidence within the context of the societal structure where race, racialization and racial relationships take place.

Research Dedicated to Critical Race Theory

En hora buena! I commend and congratulate the guest editors of this supplement of Ethnicity & Disease , Drs. Chandra L. Ford and Collins O. Airhihenbuwa, for providing a public health framework, based on Critical Race Theory (CRT), that could contribute to achieving health equity by informing research design, development, implementation and translation of findings into policy changes. This supplement includes a collection of 10 articles including qualitative and quantitative empirical research as well as a few commentaries applying CRT to current issues or public health education. We present these articles in three domains: Defining CRT, Applying CRT and Training the Next Generation.

Defining Critical Race Theory

In this section, the guest editors, Ford & Airhihenbuwa, 5 provide a concise but comprehensive summary and introduction to CRT: definition; distinction from public health; its application to health equity research; and most importantly, the presentation of a tool that could help translate CRT for use in health equity research, the Public Health Critical Race Praxis (PHCRP). While CRT refers to the social scientific approach to study race and racism in the society, PHCRP uses CRT concepts and methods for racial/ethnic health equity research. Specifically, and as one of the PHCRP three functional components (ie, race conscious orientation to research; four major focus areas; and CRT-derived lexicon), the four major focus areas could easily serve as a conceptual framework for any research question addressing racial/ethnic equity research. For instance, if I were to examine the association between race/ethnicity and hypertension in US adults, the premise is that African Americans or Blacks (40.3%) have a higher prevalence of hypertension than Whites (27.8%). 6 Using the four major focus areas, I will link: 1) hypertension in African Americans to the embodiment of the psychosocial stress associated with the racism they have and continue to experience nowadays 7 (Focus 1: Contemporary Racialization); 2) the previous hypothesis would unpack and challenge any biases around biological or genetic factors associated with the findings (Focus 2: Knowledge Production); 3) the findings would be explained in the context of the multidimensional social construction of race and the history of oppression for African Americans throughout the years (Focus 3: Conceptualization and Measurements); and 4) rather than using the findings to state the well-known and established disparities, I would use them to call attention to interpersonal and structural racism African Americans face day in and day out, which could inform interventions to prevent the onset of hypertension and help control the condition among those who have it (Focus 4: Action). Thus, PHCRP could help to: 1) inform translation of findings from research; and 2) design meaningful research studies that contribute to our understanding of racial/ethnic equity inquiry beyond the findings. Specifically, and using a PHCRP framework, the study findings could be contextualized in a society where race/ethnicity, as part of the social fabric, manifests in disproportionate negative health outcomes in minority groups such as African Americans and Hispanics relative to the majority group.

Applying Critical Race Theory

This section comprises six articles including a commentary on setting the anti-racism agenda and five studies using qualitative and quantitative methodology, applying PHCRP to big data 8 and to an existing hypothesis on the thrifty gene among Canadian aboriginal populations. 9 The articles use qualitative methodology through semi-structured interviews, focus groups and community forums and are focused on two important and distinct issues: health care disparities, a persistent problem even when access to care is not an issue 10 ; and the Flint water contamination due to a change in water supplier from Detroit’s Water Department to the Flint River in Michigan in 2014. Through semi-structured interviews and focus groups with personnel at a large Minnesota health care system, Cunningham & Scarlato 11 show how colorblindness, a way of not seeing or acknowledging race when thinking of racial/ethnic inequity or differences, among participants could evade race to inform their beliefs that all patients are treated equally by providers and staff while refuting suggestions of racial inequality. As the authors conclude, this way of thinking helps to maintain the racial status quo and may preclude efforts to promote health equity. Muhammad and colleagues, 12 on the other hand, using community forums of mostly Black adolescents aged 13 to 17 years in Flint, aimed to understand how participants conceptualize, interpret and respond to the racism they perceive as part of the administrative process that led to the Flint water contamination. The youth clearly connected the racial composition of the city (ie, a Black city) and its historical and persistent racial stratification with the water contamination crisis, seeing it as a type of genocide targeting Blacks. Thus, they saw the water contamination problem as yet another form of racism against the city residents.

Roberts et al, 13 using intersectionality as part of CRT, examine the combined effects of gender and racial teen discrimination on dating violence among Black and Hispanic adolescents aged 13 to 19 years in Bronx, New York. Findings suggest that adolescents reporting both gender and racial discrimination were 2.5 as likely to report experiencing dating violence compared with those who did not report gender and racial discrimination after adjusting for age and sex. Ford and colleagues 8 provide an application of three foci of PHCRP – contemporary racial relations; knowledge production; and conceptualization and measurement – into an empirical study that uses big data (N=3,476,741) in California. The authors discuss the advantages and disadvantages of applying PHCRP to their research but emphasize the potential for the study to establish the feasibility of using PHCRP elements for social epidemiology, health services research and other studies using big data. The authors also present the next steps for the analytical phase of the study to translate their findings into action, the four foci of PHCRP.

This section includes two sole-authored commentaries by Hay and Jones. Hay 9 uses the application of PHCRP to the thrifty gene hypothesis, a racist theory of genetic predisposition to type 2 diabetes among Indigenous populations in Canada as proposed by James V. Neel in 1962. Stressing the need to incorporate CRT and PHCRP in public health research, he discusses how, despite the thrifty gene theory being debunked in 1989 by Neel himself, it is still imprinted in the DNA of the Canadian health system as relates to their indigenous populations.

Finally, this section includes a commentary on anti-racism. Jones 14 describes her experience in putting racism at the forefront during her tenure as president of American Association of Public Health (APHA) and her use of allegories such as the Gardener’s Tale or the Cliff Analogy to call attention to how racism impacts our lives. During her term at APHA, she proposed the launching of a National Campaign against Racism to bring attention to this foundational pillar of our history and root cause of health inequity. Focusing on the denial of racism in our society, she discusses the three main tasks of the proposed Campaign: naming racism; asking “How is racism operating here?”; and organizing and strategizing to act. While APHA did not host the Campaign, other institutions/venues are currently embracing anti-racism and campaign elements as a framework for their work.

Training the Next Generation

The three articles under this domain present a proposal to include CRT in a public health curriculum and discuss the results of conversations to develop a medical school curriculum on racism using PHCRP among a multiracial group of faculty members as well as the experiences of training professionals on CRT. Israel Cross 15 not only underscores the lack of historical and contemporary instructions on race and the role it plays in shaping health but also how, to some extent, White supremacy is maintained or normalized through the public health curriculum. She proposes ways in which CRT could be embedded in the public health curriculum to inform education, methodology and practice. Hardeman et al 16 discusses a 12-month, two-phased conversation process among faculty members of a medical school to develop a curriculum on racism. The conversations included only minority women in Phase I and integrated males and White colleagues in Phase II. The findings suggest that the Phase I discourse went not only well but was also described as ‘powerful’ by the participants. However, for Phase II, participants in Phase I became quieter and the group dynamics shifted. The results call attention to the importance of conversations on racism and its roles among people of all racial/ethnic backgrounds and the need to account for gender-race intersectionality when having such conversations. Finally, Butler et al 17 praise the success of a 2.5-day training program using CRT. The authors state that there was a wide range of participation along the career continuum and that participants were eager to examine race and racism in their research using a PHCRP framework.

Conclusions

CRT and PHCRP aim to identify and contextualize racism in the design, implementation, conduct and translation of research findings. This supplement of Ethnicity & Disease on CRT and PHCRP is crucial given our current times. Interestingly, this year marks the 50th anniversary of the “Separate and Unequal” or Kerner report. 18 This report’s main conclusion was that the nation was moving toward two societies, one Black and one White, and that these societies were separate and unequal due mainly to the pervasive discrimination and segregation in Blacks but unknown to Whites. While there have been some improvements for Blacks, they are still experiencing disadvantages due to race inequality. For instance, Jones et al 19 compare key sociodemographic and health-related characteristics for Blacks and Whites between 1968 and 2018. This comparison underscores four Black-White disparities that have increased over the past 50 years: the percentage of college-educated (Black-White gap: 7.1% in 1968 vs 19.3% in 2018); median wealth in 2016 USD (Black-White gap: $45,188 in 1968 vs $153,591 in 2018); incarcerated per 100,000 population (Black-White ratio: 5.4 in 1968 vs 6.4 in 2018); and infant mortality per 1,000 live births (Black-White ratio: 1.9 in 1968 vs 2.3 in 2018). 19 Moreover, we can add the re-emerging structural racism of police brutality against Black men, including killing while the Black victim is not attacking or unarmed. 20 The latter has a direct effect on the mental health of Black adults in the general population. These statistics suggest that we still have a long way to go to create an equal society and call attention to the tenets of CRT and PHRCP to incorporate race and racism when conducting research to reduce and eventually eliminate health inequity. Thus, we are excited to publish this supplement and commend the guest editors and contributing authors for tackling this timely issue.

Acknowledgments

Ethnicity & Disease gratefully acknowledges publication and other support for this supplement from: the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health; United to Re-create Intersections and Spaces for Engagement (U-RISE), LLC; Center for AIDS Research (grant #AI028697); and the Institute of American Cultures at the University of California at Los Angeles.

The journal thanks Guest Editors Chandra L. Ford, PhD, MPH and Collins O. Airhihenbuwa, PhD, MPH for their work in bringing together researchers from around the nation and Canada to contribute to advancing Critical Race Theory in public health. We also thank the many reviewers who gave of their time and expertise to ensure the scientific rigor of this issue.

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Doctor of Philosophy in Teaching and Learning, Critical Studies in Education: Race, Justice, and Equity

CSERJE prepares highly qualified scholars to affect change in society. The specialization bridges theory and practice and deeply engages students in liberatory research practices (i.e. decolonizing, emancipatory, and humanizing theories, methodologies and methods) while also offering space for critical interrogation of historical practices that have harmed and disenfranchised communities. Faculty ask students to engage in deep reflexive understanding of the ways their selves are in relation to their worlds (both global and local and the interactions between those two) that provide critical implications for policy and practice. CSRJE prepares students to build with families, social groups, schools, organizations, and communities to interrupt and disrupt injustices while re-centering experiences and knowledges often held at the margins of society.

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David embrick: what is critical race theory–and why is it important to understand.

Lorna Grisby's article in  Reader's Digest , " What is Critical Race Theory--and Why is it Important to Understand? ," asks experts to define the concept of Critical Race Theory and explain its real-world implications. Among those experts is  David Embrick , Associate Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies. Check out an excerpt from the article below.

***Excerpt***

Racism is built into our systems  and exists regardless of how well or how poorly individual people within those systems act. “There is a centrality of racism,” says David G. Embrick, PhD, an associate professor of sociology and African studies at the University of Connecticut. “It’s not based on the actions of individuals. Take those few bad apples out and the racist policies and practices will continue, because of how they’re embedded within our legal structure, our educational structure, and the workplace.”

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Fall 2022 • Seminar

Critical Race Theory

Prerequisite: None

Exam Type: No Exam

This course will consider one of the newest intellectual currents within American Legal Theory – Critical Race Theory. Emerging during the 1980s, critical race scholars made many controversial claims about law and legal education – among them that race and racial inequality suffused American law and society, that structural racial subordination remained endemic, and that both liberal and critical legal theories marginalized the voices of racial minorities. Course readings will be taken from both classic works of Critical Race Theory and newer interventions in the field, as well as scholarship criticizing or otherwise engaging with Critical Race Theory from outside or at the margins of the field.

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Background and early history

• The social construction of race and the normality of racism
• Interest convergence, differential racialization, intersectionality, and the voice of colour
• Academic and political criticism of critical race theory

What is critical race theory?

Why was critical race theory developed, why is critical race theory important, how does critical race theory challenge the neutrality of law, how did critical race theory evolve.

critical race theory

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• The Brookings Institution - Why are states banning critical race theory?
• BlackPast - Critical Race Theory: A Brief History
• Open Text WSU - Theoretical Models for Teaching and Research - Critical Race Theory
• Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University - Critical Race Theory
• World Economic Forum - What is critical race theory?
• Table Of Contents

Critical race theory is an intellectual movement and a framework of legal analysis according to which (1) race is a culturally invented category used to oppress people of colour and (2) the law and legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist insofar as they function to create and maintain social, political, and economic inequalities between white and nonwhite people.

Critical race theory developed in the 1970s as an effort by activists and legal scholars to understand why the U.S. civil rights movement had lost momentum and was in danger of being reversed. Their approach emphasized general and systemic features of the legal system that served to perpetuate race-based oppression and white privilege.

Critical race theory is important because it potentially provides a more realistic understanding of white racism in the U.S. as not merely a set of negative attitudes toward other racial groups but also a body of law and legal practices whose real-world effect is the oppression of people of colour, especially African Americans.

Critical race theorists argue that laws that explicitly impose a neutral standard with respect to race are capable of addressing only the most egregious forms of race-based oppression and often have only limited (though still valuable) practical benefits for disadvantaged minority groups, affording them equality of treatment or opportunity but not equality of results.

Critical race theory evolved from the critical legal studies movement , which examined how the law and legal institutions serve the interests of the wealthy. It was also influenced by the insight of (then) radical feminism that forms of domination and oppression may be exercised or manifested in seemingly innocuous and largely unnoticed social practices.

critical race theory (CRT) , intellectual and social movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of colour. Critical race theorists hold that racism is inherent in the law and legal institutions of the United States insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans . Critical race theorists are generally dedicated to applying their understanding of the institutional or structural nature of racism to the concrete (if distant) goal of eliminating all race-based and other unjust hierarchies .

Critical race theory (CRT) was officially organized in 1989, at the first annual Workshop on Critical Race Theory, though its intellectual origins go back much farther, to the 1960s and ’70s. Its immediate precursor was the critical legal studies (CLS) movement, which dedicated itself to examining how the law and legal institutions serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the poor and marginalized . (CLS, an offshoot of Marxist-oriented critical theory , may also be viewed as a radicalization of early 20th-century legal realism , a school of legal philosophy according to which judicial decision making , especially at the appellate level, is influenced as much by nonlegal—political or ideological—factors as by precedent and principles of legal reasoning.) Like CLS scholars, critical race theorists believed that political liberalism was incapable of adequately addressing fundamental problems of injustice in American society (notwithstanding legislation and court rulings advancing civil rights in the 1950s and ’60s), because its emphasis on the equitable treatment under the law of all races (“colour blindness”) rendered it capable of recognizing only the most overt and obvious racist practices, not those that were relatively indirect, subtle, or systemic . Liberalism was also faulted for mistakenly presupposing the apolitical nature of judicial decision making and for taking a self-consciously incremental or reformist approach that prolonged unjust social arrangements and afforded opportunities for retrenchment and backsliding through administrative delays and conservative legal challenges. Unlike most CLS scholars, however, critical race theorists did not wish to abandon the notions of law or legal rights altogether, because, in their experience, some laws and legal reforms had done much to help oppressed or exploited people.

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Critical Race Theory: A Brief History

How a complicated and expansive academic theory developed during the 1980s has become a hot-button political issue 40 years later.

By Jacey Fortin

About a year ago, even as the United States was seized by protests against racism, many Americans had never heard the phrase “ critical race theory. ”

Now, suddenly, the term is everywhere. It makes national and international headlines and is a target for talking heads. Culture wars over critical race theory have turned school boards into battlegrounds, and in higher education, the term has been tangled up in tenure battles . Dozens of United States senators have branded it “activist indoctrination.”

But C.R.T., as it is often abbreviated, is not new. It’s a graduate-level academic framework that encompasses decades of scholarship, which makes it difficult to find a satisfying answer to the basic question:

What, exactly, is critical race theory ?

First things first …

The person widely credited with coining the term is Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a law professor at the U.C.L.A. School of Law and Columbia Law School.

Asked for a definition, she first raised a question of her own: Why is this coming up now?

“It’s only prompted interest now that the conservative right wing has claimed it as a subversive set of ideas,” she said, adding that news outlets, including The New York Times, were covering critical race theory because it has been “made the problem by a well-resourced, highly mobilized coalition of forces.”

Some of those critics seem to cast racism as a personal characteristic first and foremost — a problem caused mainly by bigots who practice overt discrimination — and to frame discussions about racism as shaming, accusatory or divisive.

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critical race theory

Frequently asked questions.

To help you learn more about Critical Race Theory (CRT), LDF has compiled answers to the most frequently asked questions about critical race theory. This resource also includes information on the laws banning critical race theory and racial justice discourse being enacted across the country and how they fit into a larger effort to suppress the voice, history, and political participation of Black Americans. 

Critical Race Theory, or CRT , is an academic and legal framework that denotes that systemic racism is part of American society — from education and housing to employment and healthcare. Critical Race Theory recognizes that racism is more than the result of individual bias and prejudice. It is essentially an academic response to the erroneous notion that American society and institutions are “colorblind.”

Critical Race Theory recognizes that racism is embedded in laws, policies and institutions that uphold and reproduce racial inequalities. According to CRT, societal issues like Black Americans’ higher mortality rate, outsized exposure to police violence, the school-to-prison pipeline, denial of affordable housing, and the death rates of Black women in childbirth are not unrelated anomalies.

The scholarly framework holds that racism goes far beyond just individually held prejudices, and that it is in fact a systemic phenomenon woven into the laws and institutions of this nation. A cursory review of U.S. history — or even just news headlines from 2020, where far too many examples of police brutality and violence against Black people propelled a historic racial justice movement — proves the truth of this theory. The classroom itself, currently the focal point of the ongoing fight to suppress uncomfortable truths about America, has traditionally been the site of some of this nation’s most egregious acts of state sponsored racism. This includes segregation, which theLDF has been at the forefront of challenging since our founder and the first Black Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall successfully litigated Brown v. Board of Education   in the 1950s.

Critical Race Theory was first developed by legal scholars in the 1970s and ‘80s following the Civil Rights Movement. It was, in part, a response to the notion that society and institutions were “colorblind.” CRT holds that racism was not and has never been eradicated from our laws, policies, or institutions, and is still woven into the fabric of their existence.

Critical Race Theory should be embraced as a framework to develop laws and policies that can dismantle structural inequities and systemic racism. Building a more equitable future requires an examination of how the shameful history of slavery, caste, and systemic racism were foundational to laws and institutions that exist today.

• Bans on any discussion or teaching that the United States is inherently or fundamentally racist. 
• Bans on what legislatures have deemed “divisive concepts,” including white supremacy, male privilege, white privilege, equity, unconscious or implicit bias systemic racism. However, the bans lack context, definitions, or examples of the ways they are being taught.
• Requirements to teach “without giving deference to any one perspective” and provide a counter narrative or opposing view of anything being taught.
• Ban discussions of systemic racism and sexism that would “discriminate,” “hurt feelings” or make someone feel “guilty” about their skin color.
• Drastic limits and funding cuts for anti-bias trainings and diversity and inclusion initiatives for students and teachers.
• Provisions allowing the state to withhold funding for schools that violate the bans.

Former President Trump’s “ Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping” issued in September 2020 became the blueprint for states to craft their own bans on truth. Many of the same vague “divisive concepts” banned in the Executive Order reappear in current state legislation. Many state laws also include provisions that establish financial penalties for noncompliance and threaten to cut state funding of schools that disobey the bans.

In the Executive Order, former President Trump directed federal agencies to end trainings related to the discussion of inequality, critical race theory or other forms of what he labeled “propaganda.” It went so far as to establish a McCarthy-esque hotline for people to report on the behavior of others. A few months later, a federal judge later blocked the directive and the Biden Administration has since rescinded the Order.

Critical Race Theory is primarily taught at the secondary and post-secondary levels. However, many states have enacted laws banning CRT in elementary or high schools and laws that could restrict what students can learn and silence conversations about our history. These laws have already had a chilling effect .

Classrooms are again being used as a cudgel to silence the voices and deny the experiences of Black people and other historically marginalized groups in America. Many of these laws and measures effectively put severe restrictions on how American history and issues such as school segregation can be taught or even discussed in classrooms. Many of these measures broadly censor conversations about racism by framing the subject itself as “divisive” and “harmful,” and at least a dozen of these laws have already gone into effect. Even more worryingly, several state legislatures have a staggering and ever-growing   number of anti-truth bills. Several states and districts have begun banning books.

The term “critical race theory” has been co-opted by opponents as a catch-all and rallying cry to silence any discussions about systemic racism, ban the truthful teaching of American history, and reverse progress toward racial justice. The term has been unjustifiably used to include all diversity and inclusion efforts, race-conscious policies, and education about racism, whether or not they draw from CRT. Attempts to ban CRT are really attacks on free speech, on discussions about the truthful history of race and racism in the U.S., and the lived experiences of Black people and other people of color. 

Lawmakers and proponents of the bans insist they are advocating for a balanced and “patriotic” education. However, these bans do the exact opposite: deny the truth about our nation’s history, silence dissent, and punish those who speak the truth to counter whitewashed falsehoods.

After the historic 2020 election, which included record turnout among Black voters, states passed the strictest voting laws in decades. When millions of people took to the streets to protest police violence, states responded by passing laws criminalizing protest. Now, as individuals across the country, of all races and backgrounds, are coming to recognize the history of systemic racism and its ongoing impact, states are responding by attempting to silence discussions of these issues. The bans are part of a coordinated backlash to the realization of a true multi-racial democracy in America.

Bans on “critical race theory” are bans on truth and history. Critical Race Theory is not taught in K-12 schools. These laws seek to ban the teaching of a true American history and all of its racist elements. These laws ban virtually any discussions about how racism has shaped our nation’s policies and history- from education and housing to employment and healthcare. Ultimately, these laws are blanket bans on racial discourse and attempt to deny our nation’s shameful legacy of racial oppression. These bans are attacks on free speech that silence those who speak the truth about our nation’s history. 

The vast majority of school board members are elected officials who have power over school policy decisions, budgets, programming, resource allocation, curriculum, and faculty tenure. They have the power to vote down or institute school district policies, programs, and budgets. Currently, unprecedented numbers of mostly white parents are attending meetings to demand that school boards use their power to ban the teaching of so-called “critical race theory” in schools. 

Recent efforts to ban racial justice discourse are part of a long American history of backlash in response to demands for educational equity. Laws banning racial justice discourse are attacks on all students’ right to a fair, full, and truthful education about their country and their communities. Members of school boards must use their influence to resist bans on truth and defend the rights of teachers and students to discuss race in a classroom setting. Lo cal elections have the power to shape the future of your school district. Learn more about local elections and candidates at Vote.org.

Former President Trump’s Executive Order, and the attacks on racial discourse that followed, emerged after the publication of The 1619 Project by the New York Times. The landmark journalism series published in 2019 aimed to tell a more complete story of slavery’s role in shaping America and the lasting effects of enslavement. Many states specifically banned The 1619 Project as an example of “teaching or discussing that the U.S. is inherently racist.”

The 1619 Project was conceived by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. In April 2021, Ms. Hannah-Jones accepted the appointment as Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at University of North Carolina. In an unprecedented decision, the university’s Board of Trustees voted to deny her tenure. The decision was a clear retaliation against Ms. Hannah-Jones for her leadership on The 1619 Project and the result of a campaign by conservative activists to discredit her work. More broadly, it was an attempt to silence those who speak the truth about our nation’s history of race and racism.

LDF represents Ms. Hannah-Jones in connection with the Board’s failure to consider and approve the faculty recommendation of tenure. Read Ms. Hannah-Jones’ statement regarding her decision to decline the eventual tenure offer at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and to instead accept a Knight Chair appointment at Howard University here .

More Pro-Truth Resources

Ldf's pro-truth work.

LDF is at the forefront of the fight to ensure that America lives up to the ideals of justice and equality for all. The right to free expression and the right to vote are cornerstones of our democracy. Through litigation, public advocacy, and community organizing, LDF and coalition partners are fighting back to protect truth. LDF is working to protect truth in education in Texas , Alabama and South Carolina . All three states introduced legislation that could threaten truthful and honest discussions of history in classrooms , universities, and state agencies. 

LDF Original Content

American, redefined: how language is weaponized to oppress and marginalize.

The linking of discussions of systemic oppression, race, gender expression, and sexual orientation with “anti-American” sentiments is intentional. It’s an attempt to redefine and reclassify who gets to call themselves American, regardless of their relationship to the country.

What Florida Stands to Lose From its War on Books and Black History

Public education has been taken hostage in Florida. And the state legislature and governor’s feverish campaign to strictly limit what facts and information can be accessed in public learning institutions is the driving force behind this egregious incursion.

How Woke Went From "Black" to "Bad"

The word “ woke ” has been a signal urging Black people to be aware of the systems that harm and otherwise put us at a disadvantage sinc e the 1920s. This piece explores how the term “ woke ” has been manipulated and maligned to hold back racial justice progress.  

LDF Original Content Series

The war on truth:, examining the recent rise of anti-truth laws, anti-crt mania and book bans are the latest tactics to halt racial justice.

We examine the attacks on ‘ Critical Race Theory ‘ and efforts to ban books as the latest tactics to halt racial justice.

The History They Don't Want You to Know

A historical view of attacks on truth, efforts to silence conversations about our nation’s history and current inequalities, and backlash to racial justice and educational equity.

Why Truthful, Inclusive Education Benefits All Students — And How To Make It Happen

Attorneys, education experts, and researchers explain why truthful, inclusive education benefits all students and how to make it happen.

Thurgood Marshall Institute Brief

Whose history, how textbooks can erase the truth and legacy of racism.

One way in which truth is attacked is through controlling the narratives told in children’s history textbooks, a practice dating back to the U.S. Civil War. this TMI brief examines the ramifications of attempts by anti-truth groups to remove or whitewash our nation’s history and legacy of racism from K-12 public school classrooms.

Justice Above All Podcast

Outside influence, the origins of anti-crt mania.

Dr. Kesha Moore unpacks the anti-truth movement and the coordinated attempts to censor the accurate teaching of American history. Justice Above All  is joined by Katrina Feldkamp, Assistant Counsel for the Legal Defense Fund and Anya and Raven, two student leaders in the  Southlake  Anti-Racism Coalition. 

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Why americans are so divided over teaching critical race theory.

Amna Nawaz Amna Nawaz

Courtney Norris Courtney Norris

Vika Aronson Vika Aronson

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-americans-are-so-divided-over-teaching-critical-race-theory

Critical race theory, or CRT — often a graduate-level framework examining how the legacy of slavery and segregation in America is embedded in its legal systems and policies — has become the source of a political flashpoint across the country. The debate over its potential role in school curricula has roiled school districts and state legislatures nationwide. Amna Nawaz reports.

Read the Full Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Judy Woodruff:

Critical race theory is a way of thinking about America's past and present by looking at the role of systemic racism, what we have just been discussing.

But the very term itself, critical race theory, has become a political flash point across the country, especially when it comes to how to teach young people about justice and equity in America.

As Amna Nawaz reports for our Race Matters series, the debate over its potential role in school curricula has set off a firestorm that has roiled school districts and state legislatures nationwide.

Amna Nawaz:

Next year, Jamison Maddox will be a senior here in Loudoun County, Virginia. His favorite subject is history, even though he felt Black history was lacking.

Jamison Maddox, Student:

I think there could be some things that happened in history that should have been taught.

In school, do you — did you learn about the Tulsa massacre?

Jamison Maddox:

Did you learn about Juneteenth?

Do you feel like those are things that should be taught as part of your formal education?

Yes, definitely, definitely.

Jamison's mother, Vanessa, agrees.

Vanessa Maddox, Parent:

This is American history. All of it should be taught in certain contexts and also age-appropriate.

Maddox, who works as a job recruiter, and her husband, raised both their sons in this affluent Northern Virginia suburb over the last two decades.

Last year, as the national racial reckoning resonated here, Vanessa joined a Facebook group pushing what they see as anti-racism efforts in school.

Vanessa Maddox:

When I saw the anti-racist parent group, I'm like, OK, I got to be in that.

What spurred you to join that group in the first place? What has that been like?

There is a definite need for a group like this. I like to be surrounded by like-minded, fair-minded, equitable people. You don't have to think like me. You don't have to be like me, but you do have to be anti-racist.

Not everyone in Loudoun County sees it that way.

Ian Prior, Parent:

There were parents that were just sick of it. They were just sick of constantly being told, if you don't agree with me, then you're a racist.

Ian Prior's two daughters are in elementary school here. He's a former Trump administration Justice Department spokesman now leading a group called Fight For Schools, a political action committee pushing back on equity and inclusion measures.

We're not about not teaching history. We're about teaching history in an objective way that is not represented as America is systemically racist.

When you're looking not at individual acts of racism, but the systemic racism that exists within America's educational institutions, what would you suggest be done right now?

So, there's a balancing act here of making sure that there's equal opportunity for all, that we're committed to meritocracy, but also that, when we are trying to figure out how to deal with any kind of social problems, we do not overstep and overreact.

Here's two signs right there.

Parents who agree with Prior are now part of a growing chorus opposing what's known as critical race theory, or CRT, often a graduate level framework that examines how the legacy of slavery and segregation in America is embedded in legal systems and policies.

The thing is, critical race theory isn't being taught here. But that didn't stop dozens of parents from flooding a recent school board meeting to protest it.

The critical race theory has its roots in cultural Marxism. It should have no place in our school.

I will do everything I possibly can to fight to the bitter end until you prove to me that you are not teaching my children that they are racist just because they're white.

That outrage echoes messaging ricocheting across right-wing media.

Tucker Carlson, FOX News:

Critical race theory is racist.

I don't see critical theory, race theory in our Declaration of Independence.

Much of this can be traced back to a September 2020 directive by then President Trump, instructing agencies to identify and halt funding of anti-bias training for federal employees that suggests — quote — "The United States is an inherently racist or evil country."

On his first day in office, President Biden used an executive order to revoke the Trump administration's action.

Jalaya Liles Dunn, Director, Learning for Justice: When I hear the talk of critical race theory, I immediately get a signal as an alarming system for me, because it is a misrepresentation and misuse of the word.

Jalaya Liles Dunn is the director of Learning for Justice, which offers resources for teachers to create anti-bias learning experiences.

Jalaya Liles Dunn:

Culturally relevant, anti-racist instruction model is needed. We need a classroom set up, so not just instruction, but we also need a space that lets children know, you are welcome here.

An inclusive education is a space where we all are at the table together. We all hear everyone's story.

The debate over which stories are included and how they're taught has fueled push back. Critical race theory is now being leveraged as a catch-all phrase by opponents of equity and inclusion efforts in public education.

In May, House Republicans denounced it at a Capitol Hill press conference.

Critical race theory is a divisive ideology.

As did former President Trump at the North Carolina GOP Convention this month.

Donald Trump, Former President of the United States: The Biden administration is pushing toxic critical race theory and illegal discrimination into our children's schools.

Nationwide, Republican lawmakers are now legislating on the idea. According to Ed Week, as of June 18, 25 states have introduced bills or taken other steps to restrict education on racism and bias. That includes five states, Texas, Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, where bills have already been signed into law.

Arizona's proposed bias teaching bill could mean a potential $5,000 penalty for teachers. Texas' bill, effective September 1, says teachers cannot be compelled to discuss current events. And, if they do, they must — quote — "strive to explore the topic from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference."

Some educators, meanwhile, are holding Teach the Truth rallies, fighting what they call unwarranted legislation.

Valerie Wolfson, Teacher:

I think we're raising up future voters who will not have a well-rounded perspective on their own community and society.

Valerie Wolfson teaches eighth grade social studies in New Hampshire, where a new bill would prohibit so-called divisive concepts related to sex and race from schools.

Valerie Wolfson:

Teachers would be under pressure for severe censorship or fear of that public judgment. It's set up for people to report on you. And…

And it could have a chilling effect on what people teach in their classrooms?

Completely. Completely.

Back in Loudoun County, we sat down with school superintendent Scott Ziegler.

Scott Ziegler, Superintendent, Loudoun County Public Schools:

We have said for months now we are not teaching critical race theory in our schools. We're not using any type of program to — quote — "indoctrinate" or convert our children. Our equity work is all about doing what is best for children.

That equity work was implemented after outside probes found Black and brown students disproportionately disciplined in Loudoun County, facing racial insults and racially motivated violence, and students of color harmed by school practices.

Scott Ziegler:

What was decided at that time was, we need to endeavor on a program, a systematic program to help our teachers with this, to give them the knowledge and understanding, so they can have conversations around race, very open and very honest and sometimes very tough conversations, so that they can make our schools better for students.

The district put anti-bias training in place for teachers, the majority of whom are white. That was back in 2019.

Ian Prior's group launched this year, in 2021.

The superintendent says there is no critical race theory being taught here. Why are you arguing against something that's not being taught?

No one is saying they're teaching critical race theory in Loudoun County public schools like it's physics or chemistry. It's being implemented through teacher trainings. And that ultimately drips down to how they teach our students. And it's not a subject, but it's a way of viewing the world.

Vanessa Maddox says she and other parents will continue to push for equity in schools and a more inclusive education around American history.

The opposition groups are saying, we don't care if you teach Black history or other parts that haven't been taught. We just don't want you to say that all white people are evil.

That's not what equity states. That's not what we're saying. We're saying that all history should be taught, regardless of race.

The school year in Loudoun County has just ended, but the debate over what next year will look like is far from over.

For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Amna Nawaz, in Loudoun County, Virginia.

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Amna Nawaz serves as co-anchor of PBS News Hour.

Courtney Norris is the deputy senior producer of national affairs for the NewsHour. She can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @courtneyknorris

Vika Aronson is podcast producer at the PBS NewsHour.

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PROGRAM IN CRITICAL THEORY

The Critical Theory graduate program is an interdisciplinary cluster and certificate program that exposes graduate students to the scholarly practice of critical theory through a variety of disciplines. The Critical Theory program provides a thorough introduction to critical theory through interdepartmental course offerings. Exposure to critical theory is highly recommended for students of literature, philosophy, politics, culture, the visual arts, gender and race studies, rhetoric, and society in our post-colonial, post-modern world.

There are several ways graduate students (prospective and current) can get involved in the Critical Theory Program:

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• Indicate your interest in the Critical Theory Cluster  on the application for your respective graduate degree program.
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The War on Critical Race Theory: Or, The Remaking of Racism

• August 14, 2023
• New book by UCI Distinguished Professor of anthropology David Theo Goldberg exposes political aims, lasting impacts of attacks on CRT

To start, can you give us a working definition of what Critical Race Theory is?

Critical Race Theory developed in the late 1970s and 1980s as a legal analytic to demonstrate how race is structured into American law. “Crits,” as practitioners of legal CRT are known, seek to demonstrate that this structuring reproduces racial modes of inequality, advantaging those who are white while comparatively disadvantaging especially those who are racially identified as Black, Latino, Asian, and Indigenous.

CRT advocates that there is no biological basis to race, that “race” shifts in meaning and points of reference in order to advance the interests of whites at the expense of those who are not. It follows that there is not just one racism but a range working to advantage or disadvantage the interests of racially identified and positioned people. CRT has been committed from the outset to showing that race is not to be taken discretely but interacts “intersectionally” with other social positionings of people, most notably class and gender, thus intensifying the forms of structural discrimination the law enables. Crits further look for the ways racial interests of whites converge, offering in turn racially enabled capacities not otherwise available to them. They stress the role of narrative, or storytelling, thus enabling contribution by those without technical language in identifying and resisting the various racisms they face.

How did CRT become politicized? Who's orchestrating the attacks - and why? How do their motivations play into the overall discourse surrounding this theory and its impact on communities?

The attacks have indeed been orchestrated. The Heritage Foundation, probably the leading conservative driver of ideas, initiatives, and laws shaping American social life, has been the principal instigator of the attacks. In this political weaponizing of CRT to advance their attacks on it, Heritage has received funding and political support for its anti-CRT initiative from other conservative foundations and institutions.

While numerous activists and politicians have engaged in these attacks, the person most readily identified with defining and fueling CRT targeting is Christopher Rufo. Pretty much everyone else has inherited from him what CRT presumptuously is taken to be, its supposed conceptual history and terms of rejection. Working closely with others at the Heritage Foundation, Rufo was increasingly promoted through appearances on Fox News , where Donald Trump discovered him in the months leading up to the 2020 Presidential election. Trump was drawn to his message trashing all progressive critiques and initiatives targeting racism. The then-President’s embrace of Rufo’s messaging advanced it to a core weapon in national political electioneering.

Rufo was quite explicit about using the terms of CRT—“critical,” “race,” and “theory” — as placeholders for all that conservatives regard as the left’s “cultural insanities.” Emptied of intended meaning, these terms could then be filled with caricatures of progressive political positions, critiques, and policies. This, in turn, was used to reject the long history of critical anti-racist policy and action, no matter what CRT in fact has stood for and sought to do. Rufo and his followers have been engaged in misreading and fabrication, a clever if completely disingenuous mode of political agitprop, with considerable misleading impact.

Your book focuses particularly on how attacks on CRT have impacted public schooling. Could you elaborate on how these attacks have affected educational institutions and students?

Public schooling at all levels has indeed been a key focus of the Rufo-driven attacks on CRT. When Rufo appeared on Fox and was embraced by Trump as a key conservative ideologue, schools and colleges were on pandemic lockdown. Some parents were concerned to get their children back to school, thinking the pandemic exaggerated, so they could get back to work and socializing. These parents, overwhelmingly white, were also alarmed that critical views regarding racism had been made to occupy so prominent a feature across the curriculum. Rufo’s targeting of what students were being taught touched a raw nerve. It offered them the means to reject existing school curricula, textbooks, classrooms, and lessons, in turn purging progressive analysis of racism.

There was more, though. Conservative groups provided significant funding to support electing school board members who would advance this purging and impose draconian measures on school districts and schools. They sent seemingly concerned parents to shout down school boards, introduce conservative initiatives, and disrupt schooling. In many instances these activists were paid agitators, often from out-of-state. In his campaign for the governorship of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin secured victory by embracing both this conservative messaging and tactics. One of his first acts as Governor was to appoint as the state’s chief diversity officer the then-President of the Heritage Foundation.

The effect has been to close off to student learning critical accounts of the role of racisms in American history. They have underplayed the impact of slavery in shaping the country over time, banning history books and literary accounts revealing to students such impact not only from classroom use but also from school and university libraries. And they have curtailed initiatives seeking to advance anti-racist policy and action in their name from any school and college usage. The undertaking, in short, has been to reshape public understanding of racism, and delimit policies seeking to advance racial justice.

One of the central themes of your book is the enduring nature of structural racism, despite claims of colorblindness. Could you explain how colorblindness serves to silence meaningful actions against racism?

Structural racism is the set of conditions that promote and sustain lower quality treatment, access, and social resources available to Black and Brown people. The result has been restriction of access to quality housing, schooling, health care, work, mortgages and loans, as well as environmental conditions. Such restriction may no longer be explicit in institutional rules and protocols. But when not directly addressed, the effects of these embedded structural conditions inherited and reproduced from the past continue to be experienced: reduced home values; higher unemployment; significantly more challenged and less addressed health conditions; higher mortgage and loan rates; and urban heat rising up to 10 degrees Celsius higher than whiter suburban areas which enjoy significantly more surrounding greenery than the cemented inner city.

Those attacking CRT, most notably Christopher Rufo and his followers, deny structural racism any longer exists. After the 1964 Civil Rights Act, they insist, racism increasingly became a strictly individual expression, requiring that individual racist intentionality be demonstrated as proof. Racist producers are reduced on this account to no more than an individual bad apple here or there.

It follows that Rufo and company deny ongoing contemporary structural racism by definition, providing no arguments to sustain ongoing structurally embedded erasure. Their overriding commitment to colorblindness, in inexplicable denial of the ongoing impacts of structural racisms, renders it impossible to address these differential impacts. What they don’t “see” effectively doesn’t exist for them—or the law—and so requires no action to address or redress. Colorblindness blinds its practitioners to the racially charged conditions they feel there is no social need to attend to. It thus renders impossible to address that which is deemed by presumption  to be irrelevant, if not to exist at all.

You argue that targeting Critical Race Theory has unleashed racisms anew and protected white minority rule. Can you explain how these consequences have unfolded in society and what steps can be taken to address these issues?

Rufo and his followers insist, with no argument, that “Critical Race Theory” includes all critical targeting and discussion of racism, no matter significant differences between progressive and liberal critics. Most notably, those like Rufo insist that there is no longer systemic or structural racism, no embedding of racism within the structures of American law and society, and that what racism does exist is strictly and only the expression of individual—and so uncoordinated—racists. So they have nothing critical to say about the contemporary surge in white nationalism (presuming that only whites belong in the country) and white supremacy (that whites are superior to anyone not).

The attack on CRT, in short, has the effect of “deregulating racism,” of licensing with little if any limitation a wide range of renewed racist expression: the denial of the impact of slavery on American life, conducting “slave auctions” by high school students of fellow Black students; the banning of books from school classrooms and libraries accounting for segregation’s impacts on access to schooling, housing, and employment; the brutal treatment by police of Black people in routine traffic stops and their over-representation in the criminal justice system, prisons in particular; and most recently the closing down of initiatives to increase diversity and inclusion across American social life.

This has all transpired as the representation of whites in the American population is diminishing. Within the next 15 to 20 years, whites will no longer constitute a majority of Americans. While whites continue to control economic, social, and legal arrangements in the U.S., they sense they are at risk of losing political power. Hence the undertaking dramatically to curtail voting rights of those not white. In his lone dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) (the case rendering segregation constitutionally viable), Justice John Harlan emphasized that formal segregation is unnecessary to maintain white dominance in America. Whites were so advanced over Blacks and others economically, educationally, socially, and culturally, Harlan insisted, that colorblindness would suffice always to maintain that competitive advantage. Colorblindness, given the legacy of domination and control, would suffice to sustain white power. Rufo and his followers today take their cue from Harlan’s lead.

Given the copious nature of the Heritage-inspired rejections of CRT, and the debilitating effects in addressing racism, any counter requires multi-pronged and multi-scalar commitments. Facing down racism, experience has long shown, requires sustained action over time, not a one-time response. It requires addressing any individual or institutional expression of racism close to its point and time of expression; surfacing and addressing racist impacts of institutional policies, rules, regulation, and action; reversing institutional rules with discriminatory racial impact (for example, gerrymandered voting districts that make it more difficult if not impossible for people of color to elect a candidate of their choice than it is for white voters to elect a white candidate of theirs); finding creative ways to make available to readers of all backgrounds school textbooks or library books laying out the country’s or region’s racist history and ongoing impacts; etc.

Allowed to fester, racism is bound to manifest. Critical Race Theory, properly understood, provides the tools for necessarily identifying and addressing racisms’ expressions individually, institutionally, and socially.

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What the hysteria over critical race theory is really all about

Conservatives have launched a growing disinformation campaign around the academic concept. It’s an attempt to push back against progress.

by Fabiola Cineas

Watching the news or browsing social media, it would be easy to think that critical race theory is a complicated, controversial, or new idea.

But critical race theory, created four decades ago by legal scholars, is an academic framework for examining how racism is embedded in America’s laws and institutions. It is just now receiving widespread attention because it has morphed into a catchall category, one used by Republicans who want to ban anti-racist teachings and trainings in classrooms and workplaces across the country.

Over the past six months, Republicans in more than two dozen states have proposed bills that aim to stymie educational discussions about race, racism, and systemic oppression in the US — potentially eliminating the conversations altogether.

It all began as racial justice protests took off across the country in the summer of 2020 and a Fox News story fashioned critical race theory as a boogeyman. Though the school of thought had been relatively obscure outside of academia, a conservative campaign was launched against it, and by September, then-President Donald Trump had signed an executive order restricting implicit bias and diversity trainings by government agencies. His exit from office didn’t put an end to the assault on critical race theory, though — it only amplified it.

By January, GOP lawmakers began quietly drafting and introducing bills that mirrored one another in an effort to stop schools from teaching about racism or any topics that confront America’s history of racial and gender oppression. While they don’t all name critical race theory — which in and of itself is not being taught in many, if any, K-12 schools — the new state bills rest on the same foundation: the desire to broadly stop teaching and training on “divisive concepts.”

Many focus on public grade schools, while some target community colleges, universities, state government entities, contracts, grant recipients, and private schools. A bulk of the bills include vague language, calling for a ban on what they call “race and sex stereotyping” or “race or sex scapegoating,” meaning they want to stop instruction that makes “value judgments” that lead to, for example, white men writing apology letters, as Russell Vought, a conservative activist whose organization has written model legislation for these bills, told Vox.

Some bills specifically want to prevent the teaching of the New York Times’s 1619 Project — a sweeping collection of essays and literary works that center Black Americans’ founding contributions to the country via enslavement — which conservatives have scrutinized since it was first published in 2019. Others reflect calls by Trump for “patriotic education,” or instruction that doesn’t stray from the traditional telling of American history (think: the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson, and the fight to make the greatest country in the world).

Together, the bills amount to a Republican scare tactic and disinformation campaign, and critical race theory has in some circles become a dog whistle that communicates resistance toward racial justice progress.

So far, about 10 of these bills have passed through state legislatures, and about two dozen others are in committee; several have died. Even though legal experts told Vox that many of these bills are likely to be shot down on free speech grounds, hysteria around the term “critical race theory” has already caused chaos in local school boards, at community colleges, and for educators who want to teach students all of American history — even the parts about systemic oppression that may cause discomfort.

“When you’re really serious about addressing a problem, the last thing you do is punish people for building the tools to see the problem, to analyze the problem, and to develop the capacity to remove the problem,” legal scholar and founding critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw told Vox. “You can’t fix a problem that you can’t name. Racism is a problem in the United States, and conservatives don’t want us to name it because they are uncomfortable with it.”

What critical race theory actually is

Critical race theory emerged in law schools in the 1970s and ’80s as an alternative to the mainstream discourse and classes on civil rights law, many of which held that the best way to fight racial discrimination was to enact legal reforms. According to the doctrine of the time, when these reforms took root, they would eventually phase out racial discrimination. Critical race theorists saw this as a surface-level understanding of the role of race and racism in the law and instead posited that racism is endemic and institutionalized in the United States. For example, one legal reform can’t undo decades of housing discrimination that have kept Black people out of the housing market, nor can one bill end the health care inequities that created poor health outcomes for Indigenous communities .

Critical race theory also highlighted how, even when the law changed to increase racial equity, institutions disrupted the intentions of those laws and tried to get around them, Laura Gomez, a University of California Los Angeles law professor who co-founded the school’s critical race studies program in 2000, told Vox. At its core, critical race theory identifies this dynamic: When the country takes two steps forward in the name of progress, racist forces push it a step back.

The late Harvard professor Derrick Bell is credited with establishing critical race theory through his publications and groundbreaking course Race, Racism, and American Law. The academic concept was further cemented in 1993 when a group of legal scholars — Mari Matsuda, Charles R. Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Crenshaw — published a seminal book on the theory, Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment . “Individual law teachers and students committed to racial justice began to meet, to talk, to write, and to engage in political action in an effort to confront and oppose dominant societal and institutional forces that maintained the structures of racism while professing the goal of dismantling racial discrimination,” the authors wrote.

In addition to claiming that racism is endemic to American society, the authors put forth five tenets of critical race theory.

• First, the group was skeptical of legal theories that supported colorblindness, objectivity, and neutrality, which created an “abstracted story of racial inequality as a series of randomly occurring, intentional, and individualized acts.” In other words, the scholars wanted the legal field to think of racism on a scale much larger than one-to-one interactions; racism could never be a random act because race was socially constructed for the purpose of oppression. To be objective is to support the status quo, and thus the country isn’t working to actively redress racial inequities.
• Second, the scholars stated that every analysis of the law should be grounded in historical context, arguing that “racism has contributed to all contemporary manifestations of group advantage and disadvantage along racial lines, including differences in income, imprisonment, health, housing, education, political representation, and military service.” For example, the Black-white wealth gap — which exists because Black people have historically been excluded from wealth-building measures like homeownership — hasn’t changed since researchers started collecting related data more than 50 years ago; the typical white family is almost 10 times wealthier than the average Black one .
• Third, the theorists wrote that critical race theory acknowledges, values, and centers the knowledge of people of color who experience racism daily.
• Next, the scholars noted that critical race theory is “interdisciplinary and eclectic,” meaning it borrowed from a number of traditions like feminism, Marxism, and critical legal theory. The thinkers argued that a combination of these ideas only strengthened their framework.
• Lastly, they identified critical race theory’s goal: eliminating racial oppression as a step toward eliminating all oppression. “The interests of all people of color necessarily require not just adjustments within the established hierarchies, but a challenge to hierarchy itself.”

With this foundation, critical race theory has informed many disciplines, from education to political science to sociology, moving scholars across the country to investigate how race and racism impact their fields.

“Critical race theory is not one coherent school of thought. It’s simply an effort to confront our history of race and racism and to give us a capacity to think about what its implications are today,” Crenshaw said.

Over time, even before the recent wave of GOP bills, critical race theory has faced pushback from both conservative and liberal scholars. Liberals held that race couldn’t be theorized in relation to the law since it’s a social construct (critical race theorists countered that class was also a construct that has legal ramifications). Conservatives held that critical race theorists were taking their analysis too far, with remedies for problems like segregation turning white people into the victims.

For decades, critical race theory — and discussions and criticisms of it — have mostly been relegated to higher education, with students studying the concept in college- and graduate-level courses. It’s not, despite what the Republican bills would have their constituents believe, being discussed in many elementary or high school classrooms. What has changed over the past year, though, is the growing conservative fear that schools and educators may want to reexamine what perspectives have been traditionally left out of American history lessons.

What critical race theory has come to stand for

Credit former President Donald Trump and Fox News TV personality Tucker Carlson for the new wave of attention to critical race theory.

The backlash began last summer as America was trying to reckon with racism in the wake of the police killings of Black Americans including Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, and millions of people in major cities and small towns protested for racial justice and helped change public opinion about racism . Organizations pledged to be anti-racist. The Merriam-Webster dictionary even changed the definition of racism to include how it is systemic. Events of the summer set off what appeared to be a sea change ahead of a pivotal presidential election.

In July, a month after the height of the protests, Fox News began airing segments featuring conservative activist and Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher F. Rufo, who on Twitter claimed that he was uncovering a new “cultural revolution” that was being carried out through corporate HR, government diversity trainings, and public school curriculums.

Later in the summer, he told Tucker Carlson that he was “declaring a one-man war against critical race theory in the federal government, and I’m not going to stop these investigations until we can abolish it within our public institutions.” He pointed to a total of six training sessions or programs in federal departments that told attendees that America was “founded on racism” and “built on the backs of people who were enslaved,” and that white people “benefit from racism.”

“My goal is simple: to persuade the President of the United States to issue an executive order abolishing critical race theory in the federal government,” he tweeted . Rufo appeared on Carlson’s show once more on September 2, and two days later, Trump issued an executive order banning federal contractors from conducting racial sensitivity trainings, emphasizing his desire to stop “efforts to indoctrinate government employees with divisive and harmful sex- and race-based ideologies.”

Russell Vought, the Office of Management and Budget director at the time, also released a memo instructing federal agencies to identify any critical race theory and white privilege training within their departmental training plans in an effort to stop funding any and all programming that suggests the “United States is an inherently racist or evil country.”

Conservative media celebrated the document as a win; in response to a Breitbart article about the memo, Trump tweeted on September 5: “This is a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue. Please report any sightings so we can quickly extinguish!” The Labor Department also launched a hotline to solicit complaints about training programs that violated the executive order.

Immediately after being sworn into office, President Joe Biden rescinded Trump’s order, but the action became fuel for Republicans looking to abolish critical race theory and discredit the 1619 Project as part of their policy platforms. Since Biden’s inauguration, at least two dozen states have put related bills on the books.

“We’ve made a lot of progress,” Vought told me on a call. “Bills are popping up all over the place in areas where we have Republican governors and legislatures.”

Vought’s organization, the Center for Renewing America, along with others like the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council, have created model legislation for lawmakers and school boards to adopt, released toolkits, and held webinars to strengthen the backlash against a problem they created.

At the federal level, Vought has partnered with North Carolina Rep. Dan Bishop to try to codify Trump’s executive order. Sens. Tom Cotton, Marsha Blackburn, and Mitch McConnell have also reintroduced the Saving American History Act, legislation that would block federal funds from going to schools teaching the 1619 Project.

Vought told Vox that critical race theory is a top issue for his firm because it’s important to push back against the “false” idea that America is a systemically racist country, curb approaches that make value judgments about white people, and put a stop to the kinds of trainings that have gotten white male participants to write apology letters to women and people of color.

But critical race theory and racial justice advocates say that the GOP bills are just in search of a problem that doesn’t exist. In Georgia, where the state board of education recently approved a resolution to stop the teaching of “divisive ideologies,” it was reported that there have been no known plans to implement the discipline in the state’s classrooms. In Missouri, where lawmakers have pursued three separate bans, academics noted that critical race theory is not widely taught in schools; the same is true for Kansas and many other states.

The conservative website Critical Race Training in Education , launched by a Cornell Law School professor, aims to track implementation of critical race theory but doesn’t offer direct evidence of critical race theory being taught in K-12 schools. A statement on the website says, “Our database does not yet cover primary or secondary schools” because critical race theory education at that level is “significantly more difficult to track.”

Gomez likens the obsession with critical race theory to the “ debate ” about transgender people and public bathrooms. “It was an issue that didn’t affect large numbers of people, but right-wing media and social media decided that it was a legitimate and dangerous issue,” Gomez said.

Since March, Fox News has mentioned “critical race theory” nearly 1,300 times, according to an analysis by Media Matters. In March, Rufo, the man who spearheaded much of the outcry, declared a victory on Twitter: “We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”

The less people understand an issue, the more leeway there is for the GOP to gin up controversy, as Gomez points out. What the fight against critical race theory really shows is how Republicans are threatened by the progress that has been made with respect to racial justice and are uncomfortable with what it might actually look like to confront and eradicate racism.

“The strategy basically takes an academic concept that’s been around for three decades and suddenly turns it into an existential crisis in American politics,” said Crenshaw. Republicans “filled it with any kind of meaning — with the worst nightmares of those who believe that the American republic has turned their backs on them, that they’re seeking to replace them, that no one cares about them,” and then created “a scare tactic around it that works because there hasn’t been much conversation and critical thinking about race in the public square.”

Crenshaw says that those who have the most to lose in classroom bans against race discussions are children of color, who often don’t learn about their histories or aren’t given a fundamental understanding about oppression in school. “To preserve the idea that the past doesn’t shape the future, they are willing to heap on to current generations of students of color a story that explains how our communities have been situated in American society,” Crenshaw said of opponents of critical race theory. “That is an affront to this generation and future generations and an intolerable dimension of this assault.”

Even if the bills do pass, they are likely to be killed in court, as the states are discriminating by singling out viewpoints that they disagree with, Amber Koonce, a human rights attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told Vox. The bills also possibly violate the equal protection of the laws since they prevent employers from complying with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by banning workplace diversity trainings.

Regardless of their viability, the bills and the discussion around them have already captured the media’s attention, caused confusion as to what critical race theory actually is, and are now having a chilling effect at some educational institutions. In Oklahoma, a community college paused its fully enrolled summer course on race and ethnicity over fears of legal trouble. In Nevada, where critical race theory hysteria is only just beginning, a conservative group suggested that teachers wear body cameras to ensure they’re not teaching critical race theory. In Loudoun County, Virginia, a group of conservative parents is attempting to recall school board members after the district required teacher training in “systemic oppression and implicit bias.”

Ultimately, the controversy over critical race theory exemplifies a tenet of the theory itself: Any racial progress will be met with great resistance.

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Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry bans teaching of critical race theory in schools

Crt is an advanced academic concept traditionally taught in graduate-level courses, by: piper hutchinson - august 27, 2024 11:49 am.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry issued an executive order Tuesday prohibiting the teaching of critical race theory in Louisiana K-12 public schools. (Allison Allsop/Louisiana Illuminator)

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry issued an executive order Tuesday prohibiting the teaching of critical race theory in Louisiana K-12 public schools. 

Critical race theory (CRT) is an advanced academic concept that holds that race is socially constructed, and it examines how legal structures are used to oppress people of color. Most classes that take the theory into consideration are in graduate programs at the university level. There is no evidence these courses are being taught to children and teenagers. 

Some conservative politicians use CRT as a blanket term when targeting the teaching of slavery or other topics that actually do not apply critical race theory. 

A news release from Landry described the concept as “ divisive teachings that instruct students to view life through the lens of race and victimhood.” 

“Louisiana students are best served with a clear focus on reading, math, meaningful high school experiences, elevating the teaching profession, and expanding educational freedom for families,” Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley said in a statement to the  Illuminator. 

Bans on CRT in public K-12 schools and universities have swept conservative states. Bills to ban it have been introduced in the Louisiana Legislature but failed. 

Landry’s executive order (read below) instructs Brumley, another conservative Republican, to review the state Department of Education’s policies and contracts to eliminate anything that endorses theories that posit that a n individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive.

The superintendent has also been asked to flag claims that moral character is necessarily determined by someone’s race or sex, or that, by virtue of their race or sex, they bear responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex. 

Landry also wants Brumley to weed out anything that suggests meritocracy or traits such as a strong work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a particular race or sex to oppress another race or sex, or encourages students to discriminate against someone based on any characteristic protected by federal or state law. 

Two years ago, Brumley ushered through new social studies curricula for K-12 schools that expressly excluded critical race theory.  At the time, Brumley said he defined CRT as teaching in a way that “everything must be viewed from the lens of race.”

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

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Piper Hutchinson

Piper Hutchinson is a reporter for the Louisiana Illuminator. She has covered the Legislature and state government extensively for the LSU Manship News Service and The Reveille, where she was named editor in chief for summer 2022.

Louisiana Illuminator is part of States Newsroom , the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.

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