Aphrochic Magazine: Issue No. 7

Reference
Photo by Darlene Alderson from Pexels
its basic principles are:
1. That racism is not a biological fact but a
socially constructed set of categories designed
to codify a specific set of power relationships.
Therefore race is not real, but racism is.
2. That racism is normal in American
society. It is not an aberration, the exception to
the rule or restricted to the thoughts and actions
of a marginalized few. It is the daily lived experience
of most, if not all, people of color in this
country.
3. The establishment and protection
of racist power differentials is encoded into
American society, enforced by its laws and
expressed in its public policy. These structures
normalize the habitually racist perspectives and
processes of the country making them invisible
or at least deniable.
4. The process of legislative racial progress
and regression in America — such as affirmative
action or legalizing marijuana — is often manipulated
to serve white interests. Simultaneously,
actions designed to benefit whites are often
branded as progress for people of color.
5. Accurate and adequate representation
is crucial. The same mechanisms of control
which are used to ascribe negative stereotypes
to people of color are used to deny our ability to
speak accurately and meaningfully to our own
experiences of racism in legal, political, and
social settings.
6. That humanity is intersectional and no
one person can be fully described by their membership
in a single group. Every person has a
race, gender identity, ethnicity, sexual preference,
etc., and their experience of society will
be determined largely by the groups that they
belong to.
Where Did It Come From?
Even though a lot of the controversy and
anger around CRT seems very new, the idea
itself started back in the 1970s and has roots
that go back even further. Initially CRT grew
in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement
as scholars of color sought to understand why
the gains of the movement were not resulting
in the level of change they had anticipated and
why many of those gains seemed under constant
threat of being rolled back. Continued disparities
in education following the Brown v. Board
of Education case were of particular interest to
Derrick A. Bell Jr., a legal scholar and the first
tenured African American professor at Harvard
Law School. Professor Bell’s analysis of postcivil-rights
era America laid much of the foundation
for what would become CRT. Equally
impactful was his career which saw him lead
several protests in response to student demands
for more diverse faculty and leave several
notable posts in protest over refusals to hire or
promote qualified women of color as professors.
In 1981, the year after Bell resigned his
position at Harvard for the second time, then
incoming student, now noted scholar, Kimberlé
Crenshaw, organized with other students
to arrange for 12 scholars to hold talks at the
school around Bell’s work, “Race, Racism, and
American Law.” In 1989, Crenshaw held the first
workshop on the topic, calling it "New Developments
in Critical Race Theory,” and is therefore
credited with giving the discipline its name.
Further, she is the architect and first
positor of intersectionality, now an extremely
widespread and influential concept. Since then,
the field has both grown and diversified with
additional scholars not only adding to the canon
of what could now be termed core CRT, while
others have created group specific interpretations
including LatCrit (Latino-critical) and
TribCrit (Tribal Critical) along with Queer-critical
and Asian-critical approaches. Other
highly notable founders of CRT include Richard
Delgado, who was one of the scholars invited by
Kimberlé Crenshaw to speak at Harvard, Mari
Matsuda, a highly influential legal scholar and
the first Asian American female law professor
to gain tenure in the United States, and Patricia
J. Williams, a noted scholar and professor
who writes the column “Diary of a Mad Law
Professor” for the Nation.
Why They Scared?
At its core, CRT is simply the realization
that American laws and legal structures
are deeply impacted by race in ways that shape
every aspect of American life while obscuring
the presence and effect of race as a determining
factor. For anyone familiar with American
history, the formation of early laws to enforce
the rule of slavery, the crucial impact discussions
over slavery had on the writing and ratification
of the constitution, and the importance
of equality movements at every stage in
this nation’s development from abolition to
suffrage to LGBTQIA+ rights and BLM, this is
not an earth-shaking revelation. So why are
there those who find it so terrifying that they
are currently doing so much to criminalize even
the discussion of what is in fact just a set of legal
theories?
This is a very good question, and one that
is unfortunately beyond the scope of this article
to answer. Better answers than any we might
provide here are expectedly to be found in any
Photo by Darina Belonogova from Pexels
88 aphrochic issue seven 89