rethinking the CRT debate, Part 1 | MR Online
Realism, Idealism, and the Deradicalization of Critical Race Theory—Rethinking the CRT Debate, Part 2
The conspicuous absence of Derrick Bell—rethinking the CRT debate, Part 1
Posted Sep 10, 2021 by Patrick Anderson
Originally published: Black Agenda Report (July 23, 2021 ) |
RaceUnited StatesNewswireCritical Race Theory (CRT), Derrick Bell, Part 1
Bell levels a class critique against the Black bourgeoisie, whom he sees as having led Black political protest down the wrong path time and time again.
Recent debates about Critical Race Theory (CRT) have been abysmally uninformed at best and utterly inaccurate at worst. From corporate media and right-wing rags to independent left media, almost everyone has misrepresented or misunderstood the origins, histories, and theories of what is today known as CRT. This three-part series corrects these misunderstandings. Part 1 provides an overview of the work of Derrick Bell, the “father of critical theory.” Part 2 provides a detailed intellectual history of CRT. Part 3 presents a critique of intersectionality as an idealist, liberal iteration of CRT. The debates about Critical Race Theory (CRT) have raged in Amerika for over a year now. Though defenders and detractors alike claim to know what CRT “really” is, none of them have taken care to examine the philosophy of Derrick Bell, a man who is widely considered the “father of critical race theory.” Even Kimberlé Crenshaw, who has been treated as the foremost authority on CRT as of late, once referred to Bell as “as scholar who lit the path toward Critical Race Theory” and one to whom scholars of CRT “owe an enormous intellectual debt.” Some commentators have suggested that Bell’s CRT is a liberal philosophy. But unlike most of what passes as CRT today, Bell’s CRT is actually rooted in the Black Radical Tradition, with explicit roots in Black Nationalism and anticolonialism. Bell takes his inspiration from Paul Robeson, Frantz Fanon, Robert L. Allen, and the later writings of W. E. B. Du Bois. The tone of his writing and the strategies he offers more closely resemble Black Power than The Audacity of Hope. Derrick Bell’s version of CRT has nothing to do with the version of CRT now championed by liberal academics, Democratic party functionaries, corporate media mouthpieces, and the elites of the military-industrial complex.
By highlighting three of the most dominant themes in Bell’s CRT—materialism, realism, and anticolonialism—it becomes possible to understand the aspects of Bell’s philosophy that make it far more radical than the watered-down liberal ideology being trafficked as CRT today.
Bell was born in 1930 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and in 1957, he completed a law degree at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Bell was highly active in civil rights litigation during the 1950s and 60s. After a brief appointment in the civil rights division of the U.S. Justice Department, Bell resigned to work full time for the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund. During this time, Bell worked on dozens of desegregation cases, giving him firsthand experience where ligation and activism overlap.
In 1967, Bell left the NAACP to take up academic work, first at the University of Southern California and later at Harvard Law School. At Harvard, Bell developed a critique of the civil rights movement’s litigation strategies, and this critique provided Bell with the foundational principles of CRT. In 1973, Bell published his groundbreaking textbook Race, Racism, and American Law, the first law textbook to examine the racial implications of U.S. legal structures. During the 1980s, Bell would move from university to university, often leaving to protest the refusal of schools to hire more faculty of color. In 1991, he began teaching at New York University, where he would remain active until his death in October 2011.
The first theme in Bell’s CRT is materialism, which provides the basis for his theory of racial fortuity. Like other materialists, Bell argues that economic factors provide the foundation for other social and political phenomena and that people are primarily motivated by interests rather than moral considerations. In Silent Covenants, Bell asks: “What are the motivations, the invisible forces, that move both individuals and groups to function so predictably across time and a wide variety of conditions as to ensure a perpetually subordinate role for all but a fortunate few of those Americans who are not white?” His answer: economic interests. Referring to “racism’s economic foundation,” Bell concludes that Black people are trapped in “a giant, unseen gyroscope” of white decision making that always puts white interests before the interests of racialized groups.
Bell’s theory of racial fortuity is grounded in his materialism. Because people act based on their interests and because white people hold the majoritarian power position in Amerika, Bell concludes that the conditions Black life in the U.S. depend on whether Black interests coincide with white interests. In instances where there is “interest convergence,” Black and white interests align and Black people achieve legal and social wins. When such convergence ends, however, white people not only cease their support for Black interests but often being actively opposing Black interests in a process Bell calls “racial sacrifice.” Bell calls this process racial fortuity because the lives and well-being of Black people remain subject to chance, caught between interest convergence and racial sacrifice.
Through the lens of racial fortuity, Bell rejects the liberal view of history as one of racial progress, favoring instead a cyclical view of history in which Black people experience progress through interest convergence and setbacks under racial sacrifice. For example, Bell argues that the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War Amendments to the U.S. Constitution are instances of interest convergence. In the first case, ending slavery was a means to the end of “saving the union”; in the second case, the amendments helped the Republicans maintain control of Congress. However, these instances of interest convergence were followed by two instances of racial sacrifice: the Tilden-Hayes compromise, which ended Reconstruction, and the disenfranchisement of Black voters in the South, which prevented Black voters from influencing elections in those states.
For Bell, the most important example of interest convergence is the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled that racial segregation is unconstitutional. Bell originally argued this in his 1980 paper “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” where he posited that the Court’s decision resulted not from a moral concern about Black well-being under Jim Crow regimes but from three international and domestic interests. Internationally, the U.S. needed to end segregation because it embarrassed the country on the world stage and undermined Cold War imperatives. Bell’s thesis was later corroborated by historian Mary Dudziak, who demonstrated that the Supreme Court wanted to end segregation because the Soviet Union and Third World anticolonial movements were using Jim Crow to criticize Amerika. Domestically, the U.S. needed to end segregation because it needed to gain Black support for Cold War foreign policy and because segregation was viewed as a barrier to industrialization in the South.
Thus, Bell’s materialism inspires his theory of racial fortuity, which interprets even the most celebrated events of Amerikan racial history as cynical decisions designed to advance capitalists and imperialist ends.
The second theme in Bell’s CRT is realism, which provides the basis for his theory of racial realism. Bell’s realism begins with an emphasis on the empirical realities of Black people in Amerika. On this view, CRT politics beings with historical and sociological descriptions about what is rather than with idealistic hopes about what might be. But for Bell, when we examine the patterns of racial fortuity in Amerikan history, we should reach the obvious conclusion: there is no empirical reason to believe that racism and white supremacy will ever come to an end in Amerika. In other words, U.S. history suggests that racism is permanent and racial equality is impossible. To be sure, Bell does not mean that racism is an ahistorical or eternal phenomenon; rather, he says that nothing in Amerikan history would make any reasonable person believe that racism will end in the U.S.
Bell has gotten a lot of heat from critics who claim that racial realism leads to inaction, pessimism, and fatalism. But Bell argues that the problem is not the struggle but the aim of the struggle. Too much energy and too many resources, Bell writes, have been wasted chasing the unrealistic goal of racial equality. But that just means that the struggle should aim for something else. As Bell writes in his famous 1992 essay “Racial Realism,” “Racial Realism…requires us to acknowledge the permanence of our subordinate status. That acknowledgement enables us to avoid despair, and frees us to imagine and implement racial strategies that can bring fulfillment and even triumph.” In his follow-up book Afrolantica Legacies, Bell lays out seven “rules of racial preservation,” guidelines designed to help Black people survive and even thrive in a perpetually white supremacist empire.
Thus, Bell’s realism inspires his theory of racial realism, which views Amerikan society as permanently racist and which advocates survival strategies as a more effective and realistic alternative to traditional civil rights calls for racial equality.
The third theme in Bell’s CRT is anticolonialism, which provides the basis for his critique of the Black middle class. In Afrolantica Legacies, Bell draws upon Robert L. Allen’s Black Awakening in Capitalist America, which argues that the elite of the 1960s were implementing a program of “domestic neocolonialism.” According to Allen, the white Amerikan elite were happy to integrate politically convective middle class Blacks into the power structure because it would protect the status quo from accusations of racism while giving those same middle class Blacks a stake in the system. By becoming beneficiaries of the Amerikan capitalist empire, Black middle class citizens were increasingly likely to identify with and defend it.
Following Allen, Bell explains neocolonialism and the class role the Black bourgeoisie plays in a neocolonial regime: “The colonizing countries maintained their control by establishing class divisions within the ranks of the indigenous peoples. A few able (and safe) individuals were permitted to move up in the ranks where they served as symbols of what was possible for the subordinated masses. In this, and less enviable ways, these individuals provide a legitimacy to the colonial rule that it clearly did not deserve.”
Bell levels a class critique against the Black bourgeoisie, whom he sees as having led Black political protest down the wrong path time and time again. He criticizes NAACP lawyers for advancing the organization’s demand for integrated schools at the expense of their constituents’ demands for better Black schools. He condemns high-profile conservative Black politicians and judges, such as Clarence Thomas, referring to them as “overseers.”
Bell even directs some of this criticism toward himself. As a member of the middle class Black intelligentsia, Bell fears he and others like him reinforce the myth of racial progress merely by accepting prestigious academic appointments. “Instead of gaining access to real influence,” he writes in Afrolantica Legacies, “it is more likely that we are legitimizing a system that relegates us to an ineffectual but decorative fringe.” While Bell wanted to use his legal training and racial consciousness to improve Black life, he worried that he might inadvertently be just another neocolonial stooge.
Thus, Bell’s anticolonialism inspires his class critique of the Black bourgeoisie, causing him to be wary of Black middle class efforts to integrate themselves into, and thereby validate, the existing white-capitalist power structure.
This brief overview of Bell’s philosophy should make it clear to even the most casual observer that his version of CRT stands in stark contrast to the liberal versions of CRT now proliferating in corporate newsrooms, the halls of academia, and the lobby of the Pentagon.
In fact, Bell’s Black radical CRT can be used to understand and explain the rise of liberal CRT at this moment. The now-popular liberal CRT is advanced primarily by upper middle class Black intellectuals and journalists, on one hand, and politically liberal whites, on the other. Such CRT expresses its demands in the language of morality and justice. And, at least rhetorically, such CRT holds out hope that, one day, racial equality might be achieved in “America.” Here we have a neocolonial Black bourgeoisie seeking interest convergence with liberal whites so both parties can hold onto their power and economic status in the face of a wave of Trump-led right-wing reaction, all while continuing to propagate the myths of “American Exceptionalism.”
Derrick Bell’s CRT, the original articulation of Critical Race Theory, is far too radical for mainstream Amerika—especially those parties who have a stake in perpetuating the status quo and those parties who seek access to power without challenging capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. Given the diametrical opposition between Bell’s CRT and contemporary liberal-patriotic CRT, it comes as no surprise that Bell is missing from the debate. For if Bell’s philosophy became part of the debate, the establishment functionaries who claim to carry the mantle of CRT today would be exposed for the pseudo-radical frauds that they are.
Monthly Review does not necessarily adhere to all of the views conveyed in articles republished at MR Online. Our goal is to share a variety of left perspectives that we think our readers will find interesting or useful. —Eds.
About Patrick AndersonPatrick D. Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Central State University. His research focuses on the Anticolonial Tradition of Black Radical Thought and the connections between technology, ethics, and imperialism. In addition to contributing to Mint Press News and Black Agenda Report, Patrick is editor at the WikiLeaks Bibliography . He can be reached at panderson@centralstate.edu
Critical Race Theory (CRT)Derrick BellPart 1
Law, code and exploitation
Solely because of the increasing disorder: The Thirty-Sixth Newsletter (2021)
Also by Patrick Anderson
The theory of intersectionality emerges out of racist, colonialist ideology, not radical politics—Rethinking the CRT Debate Part 3 by Patrick Anderson September 13, 2021
The conspicuous absence of Derrick Bell—rethinking the CRT debate, Part 1 by Patrick Anderson September 10, 2021
Realism, idealism, and the deradicalization of Critical Race Theory—Rethinking The CRT Debate, Part 2
Posted Sep 13, 2021 by Patrick Anderson
Originally published: Black Agenda Report (September 8, 2021 ) |
RaceUnited StatesNewswireCritical Race Theory (CRT), Kimberlé Crenshaw, part 3
Recent debates about Critical Race Theory (CRT) have been abysmally uninformed at best and utterly inaccurate at worst. From corporate media and right-wing rags to independent left media, almost everyone has misrepresented or misunderstood the origins, histories, and theories of what is today known as CRT. This three-part series corrects these misunderstandings. Part 1 provides an overview of works of Derrick Bell, the “father of critical race theory.” Part 2 provides a detailed intellectual history of CRT. Part 3 presents a critique of intersectionality as an idealist, liberal iteration of CRT.
***
The Critical Race Theory (CRT) frenzy has been in full swing for months now, and in the rush to make sense of this intellectual tradition, corporate media have repeatedly flocked to one individual more than any other to provide their account of CRT with the cover of authority and rigor. That person is Kimberlé Crenshaw, a legal scholar who is recognized as one of the founding figures of CRT and who is credited with coining the very term “critical race theory.”
Before the recent controversy over CRT, Crenshaw was predominantly known as the scholar responsible for coining the term “intersectionality” and providing intellectual orientation to a type of feminist theory that sought to account for race and gender simultaneously rather than separately, as intersectionality theorists have accused other social theories of doing.
Yet when the scholarly origins of Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality are excavated, it becomes clear that it is rooted not only in philosophical idealism but also in racist and colonialist ideology.
The first step in understanding Crenshaw’s version of CRT and the intellectual origins of intersectionality is to understand her as part of the idealist strain of CRT. Unlike the realist theorists of CRT, such as Derrick Bell, who place racism in an economic context, approach the study of racial histories from an empirical perspective, and present anti-colonial and anti-imperial critiques of Amerikan society, idealists like Crenshaw argue that racism is largely a psychological issue, a problem with white consciousness that is best addressed through education and the evolution of language and symbols. Idealists also tend to be more reformist than radical, preferring to claim so-called “American Values” as their own, rather than fundamentally question the nation’s imperial history and present.
Such idealism and reformism are both present in Crenshaw’s work. In her 1988 essay “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law,” a foundational text of the CRT tradition and one of Crenshaw’s earliest publications, Crenshaw unquestionably stakes out her political reformism and idealist methodological orientation. Much of the article is dedicated to criticizing the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) scholars of the day for neglecting the role of race in social oppression and for too quickly dismissing the utility of liberal legal reforms, including rights-based reforms, for Black people in the U.S.
As Crenshaw explains, CLS scholars wanted people to question the structure of society from the ground up, and according to the CLS writers, the only way to get people to question society in this way was to disabuse them of all the illusions of the liberal capitalist order. This process included disabusing the public of the idea that law is socially and politically neutral. For this generation of CLS scholars, if people continue to think that claiming rights is a viable strategy for liberation, then (as Crenshaw puts it) “the legitimacy of the entire order is never seriously questioned.”
According to Crenshaw, this radical demand to fundamentally question Amerikan society requires us to overlook “the transformative potential that liberalism offers.” Claiming that “People can demand change only in ways that reflect the logic of the institutions they are challenging,” Crenshaw concludes that a “pragmatic use of liberal ideology” can help protesters and scholars resolve the racial contradictions of Amerikan society and advance the cause of Black freedom by winning and defending Black “rights.”
How would such a transformation commence? In Crenshaw’s view, it “must begin with beliefs about Blacks in American society, and how these beliefs legitimize racial coercion,” especially white race consciousness. She distinguishes between “symbolic subordination,” which denies Blacks social and political equality, and “material subordination,” which denies Black economic, health, and other material benefits of society. Importantly, in a direct inversion of the materialism of realist CRT scholars like Bell, Crenshaw says that the former causes the latter: “Symbolic subordination often created material disadvantage by reinforcing race consciousness in everything from employment to education.” In other words, if we change white people’s minds and rid them of anti-Black ideas, material change will necessarily follow.
In Crenshaw’s idealist worldview, then, CRT is about demanding that “America” become what is (supposedly) truly is: a diverse and inclusive democracy. And this goal is achieved by using law strategically and teaching white people not to be racist. It is from within this idealist, reformist context that intersectionality emerged.
Since Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” approximately three decades ago, it has become a lexical staple of much left, progressive, and liberal politics. For most such groups today, those who refuse to be “intersectional” have morally failed to be properly inclusive and have epistemically failed to adopt the most advanced social scientific paradigm.
But behind the progressive veneer of intersectionality lies an unquestionable racist and colonialist intellectual history, a history that is only beginning to be excavated and acknowledged.
Crenshaw originally developed the theory of intersectionality in two law papers. In the first, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”(1989), Crenshaw sets out to solve a very specific legal problem, namely, that “women” and “Black” are considered protected classes under anti-discrimination law, but “Black women” are not. In a review of relevant court decisions, Crenshaw observed that the courts rejected Black women’s claims of discrimination unless they could show that they were victims of more general discriminatory practices against “women” as such (including white women) or against “Blacks” as such (including Black men). So to the courts, if Black women claimed racial discrimination but Black men in the same workplace did not, the case was dismissed. Likewise, if Black women claimed sex discrimination but white women in the same workplace did not, the case was dismissed. Crenshaw’s solution was to “acknowledge” that Black women had been and could be discriminated against as Black women. To remedy the problem, the law should account for the “intersection” of race and sex and make Black women a protected class distinct of women of other races or men of the same race. As a reformist legal strategy, intersectionality is not only a clever solution to the problem it is meant to address, but it is also consistent with Crenshaw’s overall liberal philosophical perspective.
However, intersectionality become seriously problematic in her follow-up paper, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color ” (1991), where Crenshaw attempts to take intersectionality out of the realm of law and transform it into a generalized theory of society. The basic assumption of intersectionality is that all “previous” theories are “single-axis” that account for only one dimension of oppression at a time. Feminism accounts for sex or gender. Critical Race Theory (of the original realist school) accounts for race. And Marxism account for class. The innovation of intersectionality, as we are told, is that it brings together the insights of these theories to account for “race, gender, and class” simultaneously (though class is never present in so-called intersectional analyses). And notice the title: intersectionality is no longer about Black women; it is now about that ever-nebulous and ill-defined group “women of color.”
Notwithstanding the absurdity of the claim that Feminism, Marxism, and realist CRT are “single-axis” theories in the way that Crenshaw describes them, there are even more problematic aspects of intersectionality, problems that originate in the history of feminism. Drawing on the recent scholarship of philosopher Tommy Curry, we can trace out the racist and colonialist origins of intersectionality.
Crenshaw’s “gender” analysis is derived from her reliance on the work of Catherine MacKinnon, a leading second wave feminist legal scholar who argued that the basic power dynamic of society is grounded in sex difference. This male dominance theory claimed that, in Amerikan society, (all) men had structure power over (all) women. This structure is usually called patriarchy. Crenshaw believed that MacKinnon’s male dominance theory provided a theory of sex domination similar to Derrick Bell’s realist CRT theory of racial domination, which posits that the basic power dynamic is white over Black, and perhaps other racial minorities. Even though the basic assumptions of MacKinnon and Bell’s respective theories are fundamentally contradictory, Crenshaw sought to combine them. This contradiction has never been resolved, which is why so many scholars and intellectual today claim that neither race nor gender is “foundational.” Such platitudes merely allow the speaker to leave the contradiction within intersectionality unresolved.
The interesting thing is that this theory of patriarchy, this idea that all men have power over all women, was invented by white women in the 1950s to claim that they were just as oppressed as Black men in a society run by white supremacy. In books and essays including Alva Myrdal’s “A Parallel to the Negro Problem” (1944), Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), and Helen Hacker’s “Women as a Minority Group” (1955), white women scholars observed the conditions of Black men under western colonialism and racism and said: white women should think of themselves as a similarly oppressed group. Before the essays, white women were seen primarily as members of the dominant race, even by white women themselves. In fact, even white feminists saw themselves in this way, as historian Louise Michelle Newman demonstrates in her book White Women Rights. Yet in the 1950s, white women began to claim that they were oppressed in a manner analogous to Black men.
For the idea that “women” as such constituted an oppressed class subjected to “men” as such to become the dominant paradigm, feminists needed to discard the kinship theory of patriarchy.
Even into the 1970s and 1980s, feminist anthropologists and sociologists adopted the classical social science view that patriarchy had a familial and generational aspect to it. However, while this kinship view was compatible with the earlier theories that saw white women as part of the dominant racial group, it was incompatible with the idea that women constitute a singular coherent class of oppressed people. Why? Because if patriarchy depends on family relations, and Black people (especially Black men) are prohibited from joining the family relations of whites, then Black men cannot be members of a generally patriarchal class of “men.” The paradigm text where this argument is made is Sylvia Walby’s Theorizing Patriarchy (1990), which was published in the very same intellectual milieu and shared the same assumptions as MacKinnon’s male dominance theory.
As Curry summarizes, “the white woman used the body and experience of the Negro, specifically the Black man, as the template by which she created the idea that she was in fact a minority group despite the power and violence she imparted on racial and ethnic groups such as Blacks and Jews.” Curry adds that “the definition of patriarchy that emerged from these debates were driven by the need white feminists had in constructing themselves as a class external to—and victimized by—white patriarchy. The feminist definition of patriarchy was constructed to protect feminist ideology, not to explain the oppression of various groups throughout history.”
Thus, Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality relies on a paradigm of feminist ideology that constructed by white women to minimize attention to their racial power and amplify attention to their sexual vulnerability. And to construct this view of patriarchy, they had to throw out decades of social scientific scholarship even though there was no empirical evidence that debunked that former scholarship.
As if this were not enough to question intersectionality, there are more problems with Crenshaw’s formulation of this now-popular theory. Like MacKinnon, Crenshaw argued that when power is based on biological sex, the sex in power—males—use sexual violence as a means of social control. To put it in no uncertain terms, men rape women as a means of perpetuating their control over women.
In her 1991 essay, Crenshaw states that “the use of rape to legitimize efforts to control and discipline the Black community is well established in historical literature on rape and race.” Though she claims this fact is well established, she cites only Joyce Williams and Karen Holmes’ 1981 work The Second Assault: Rape and Public Attitudes. As with MacKinnon’s theory of patriarchy, however, we can trace the history of Williams and Holmes’ work back to fundamentally racist origins.
In their 1967 book The Subculture of Violence, Martin Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti introduced the “subculture of violence” theory, which argues that subordinated groups, such as Black people in Amerika, had a distinct culture separate from mainstream white culture, and that this Black subculture was the cause of Black men and women’s supposed pathologically self-destructive behavior. Anyone familiar with right wing politics in the United States today should find this argument familiar, for the subculture of violence theory is the basis for all right-wing apologetics regarding police murders of Black people (“They are killing each other” etc.).
In 1971, Wolfgang’s student Menachem Amir expanded the subculture of violence theory in his book Patterns of Forcible Rape. According to Amir, Black men become rapists because “Negro culture” was pathological and the Black family structure was improper. Because Black fathers were absent, because Black mothers were unfit parents, and because Black culture prioritized sensual pleasures over civilized ones, Amir claimed that Black men developed a psychological need to overcompensate for their feminized self-image. Thus, they became rapists. If this also sounds like a contemporary right wing racist view, it’s because it is.
“White feminists adopted Amir’s view of Black masculinity throughout their texts,” Curry explains. In Against Our Will (1975), Susan Brownmiller insisted that “The single most important contribution of Amir’s Philadelphia study was to place the rapist squarely within the subculture of violence.” This book is considered a classic and still-relevant feminist text today.
Interestingly, Amir rejected the 19th and early 20th century view that Black men primarily raped white women. Yet he replaced that view with a new theory which claimed that Black men primarily raped Black women. This transition from view Black men as inter-racial rapists to viewing them as intra-racial rapists is a key development in this racist history. Yet one more transformation in this feminist ideology was necessary.
In the mid-1970s, Lynn Curtis published several works, including the book Violence, Rape, and Culture, transforming the subculture of violence theory into a theory of Black male pathology. Unlike Amir, who argued that Black male rapists were the product of the savagery of Black culture, Curtis argued that Black male’s became rapists because in their quest for masculinity, the emulated white male patriarchy and the sexual violence such patriarchy relies upon. Unlike Amir’s theory, in which Black women play a role in transmitting the supposedly deficient values of Black culture, Curtis’ theory positions Black women as neutral or innocent bystanders to the brutality of pathological Black males trying desperately to join the patriarchy they have been excluded from. On this view, white male patriarchy is more sophisticated and Black male attempts at patriarchy are more savage—but they are fundamentally the same.
When Williams and Holmes wrote The Second Assault, they cited the work of Curtis and developed it further. In their own articulation, Williams and Holmes states that Black men became rapists not because Black culture is savage but because Black men imitate the patterns of white male patriarchy. The supposed sameness of Black males and white males (a male body) was thought to be the grounds for such imitative behavior, and the supposed sameness of Black women and white women (a female body) was thought to be the grounds for their respective vulnerability to sexual violence. Interestingly, The Second Assault was poorly received by scholars, with one reviewer noting that the quantitative data presented in the book did not support—nay, contradicted!—the conclusions presented.
Thus, when Crenshaw cites Williams and Holmes to claim that “the use of rape to legitimize efforts to control and discipline the Black community is well established in historical literature on rape and race,” she is relying on a book that not only emerges directly out of white supremacist theories of Black life (perpetuating the myth the Black male rapist in a new form) but a book that presents conclusions in contradiction with its evidence.
Again, Crenshaw’s “gender” analysis is not revolutionary, nor progressive—it is barley liberal. It is based in racist scholarship that was motivated by the political needs of elite white women rather than historical and sociological evidence. And it is only a few degrees away from the racist bile spewed by contemporary anti-Black right-wing pundits.
The racist, colonialist mentality embedded in Crenshaw’s intersectionality should not surprise us. Remember what she said in 1988: People can demand change only in ways that reflect the logic of the institutions they are challenging. Because intersectionality was created to make change within racist and colonialist institutions, it is only fitting that intersectionality reflect that racist and colonialist logic. This is where idealist versions of CRT take us.
Intersectionality is not going away. Since their publication, Chrenshaw’s 1989 and 1991 articles have approximately 21,000 citations and 27,000 citations respectively. Now that intersectionality has been hitched to the current CRT wave of popularity, and given that Crenshaw is widely considered the foremost authority on CRT, we should expect calls for this theory of intersectionality to spread even more.
To be sure, almost no present-day proponent of intersectionality knows anything about the history of the term or the roots of the theory. Almost none of these self-described advocates of intersectionality knows how to perform an “intersectional analysis.” For most, the word “intersectionality” is—like “critical race theory” itself—an empty slogan used to signal that they have the right moral orientation; many people say “intersectionality” to prove they oppose racism, sexism, and so on. But when Black feminists of the 1990s are caught repackaging white supremacist ideas from the 1890s, we should probably reconsider not only the slogans we think are progressive but also the scholars we think are authorities on radical change.
This series on CRT is dedicated to Glen Ford, who was a deeply inspirational revolutionary thinker and who will always have my utmost admiration and appreciation. Thank you, Glen.
Monthly Review does not necessarily adhere to all of the views conveyed in articles republished at MR Online. Our goal is to share a variety of left perspectives that we think our readers will find interesting or useful. —Eds.
About Patrick AndersonPatrick D. Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Central State University. His research focuses on the Anticolonial Tradition of Black Radical Thought and the connections between technology, ethics, and imperialism. In addition to contributing to Mint Press News and Black Agenda Report, Patrick is editor at the WikiLeaks Bibliography . He can be reached at panderson@centralstate.edu
Critical Race Theory (CRT)Kimberlé Crenshawpart 3
How the U.S. came to dominate Haiti: seizing the gold
10 brilliant new albums to unfuck the world
Also by Patrick Anderson
The theory of intersectionality emerges out of racist, colonialist ideology, not radical politics—Rethinking the CRT Debate Part 3 by Patrick Anderson September 13, 2021
The conspicuous absence of Derrick Bell—rethinking the CRT debate, Part 1 by Patrick Anderson September 10, 2021
Realism, Idealism, and the Deradicalization of Critical Race Theory—Rethinking the CRT Debate, Part 2The conspicuous absence of Derrick Bell—rethinking the CRT debate, Part 1
Posted Sep 10, 2021 by Patrick Anderson
Originally published: Black Agenda Report (July 23, 2021 ) |
RaceUnited StatesNewswireCritical Race Theory (CRT), Derrick Bell, Part 1
Bell levels a class critique against the Black bourgeoisie, whom he sees as having led Black political protest down the wrong path time and time again.
Recent debates about Critical Race Theory (CRT) have been abysmally uninformed at best and utterly inaccurate at worst. From corporate media and right-wing rags to independent left media, almost everyone has misrepresented or misunderstood the origins, histories, and theories of what is today known as CRT. This three-part series corrects these misunderstandings. Part 1 provides an overview of the work of Derrick Bell, the “father of critical theory.” Part 2 provides a detailed intellectual history of CRT. Part 3 presents a critique of intersectionality as an idealist, liberal iteration of CRT. The debates about Critical Race Theory (CRT) have raged in Amerika for over a year now. Though defenders and detractors alike claim to know what CRT “really” is, none of them have taken care to examine the philosophy of Derrick Bell, a man who is widely considered the “father of critical race theory.” Even Kimberlé Crenshaw, who has been treated as the foremost authority on CRT as of late, once referred to Bell as “as scholar who lit the path toward Critical Race Theory” and one to whom scholars of CRT “owe an enormous intellectual debt.” Some commentators have suggested that Bell’s CRT is a liberal philosophy. But unlike most of what passes as CRT today, Bell’s CRT is actually rooted in the Black Radical Tradition, with explicit roots in Black Nationalism and anticolonialism. Bell takes his inspiration from Paul Robeson, Frantz Fanon, Robert L. Allen, and the later writings of W. E. B. Du Bois. The tone of his writing and the strategies he offers more closely resemble Black Power than The Audacity of Hope. Derrick Bell’s version of CRT has nothing to do with the version of CRT now championed by liberal academics, Democratic party functionaries, corporate media mouthpieces, and the elites of the military-industrial complex.
By highlighting three of the most dominant themes in Bell’s CRT—materialism, realism, and anticolonialism—it becomes possible to understand the aspects of Bell’s philosophy that make it far more radical than the watered-down liberal ideology being trafficked as CRT today.
Bell was born in 1930 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and in 1957, he completed a law degree at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Bell was highly active in civil rights litigation during the 1950s and 60s. After a brief appointment in the civil rights division of the U.S. Justice Department, Bell resigned to work full time for the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund. During this time, Bell worked on dozens of desegregation cases, giving him firsthand experience where ligation and activism overlap.
In 1967, Bell left the NAACP to take up academic work, first at the University of Southern California and later at Harvard Law School. At Harvard, Bell developed a critique of the civil rights movement’s litigation strategies, and this critique provided Bell with the foundational principles of CRT. In 1973, Bell published his groundbreaking textbook Race, Racism, and American Law, the first law textbook to examine the racial implications of U.S. legal structures. During the 1980s, Bell would move from university to university, often leaving to protest the refusal of schools to hire more faculty of color. In 1991, he began teaching at New York University, where he would remain active until his death in October 2011.
The first theme in Bell’s CRT is materialism, which provides the basis for his theory of racial fortuity. Like other materialists, Bell argues that economic factors provide the foundation for other social and political phenomena and that people are primarily motivated by interests rather than moral considerations. In Silent Covenants, Bell asks: “What are the motivations, the invisible forces, that move both individuals and groups to function so predictably across time and a wide variety of conditions as to ensure a perpetually subordinate role for all but a fortunate few of those Americans who are not white?” His answer: economic interests. Referring to “racism’s economic foundation,” Bell concludes that Black people are trapped in “a giant, unseen gyroscope” of white decision making that always puts white interests before the interests of racialized groups.
Bell’s theory of racial fortuity is grounded in his materialism. Because people act based on their interests and because white people hold the majoritarian power position in Amerika, Bell concludes that the conditions Black life in the U.S. depend on whether Black interests coincide with white interests. In instances where there is “interest convergence,” Black and white interests align and Black people achieve legal and social wins. When such convergence ends, however, white people not only cease their support for Black interests but often being actively opposing Black interests in a process Bell calls “racial sacrifice.” Bell calls this process racial fortuity because the lives and well-being of Black people remain subject to chance, caught between interest convergence and racial sacrifice.
Through the lens of racial fortuity, Bell rejects the liberal view of history as one of racial progress, favoring instead a cyclical view of history in which Black people experience progress through interest convergence and setbacks under racial sacrifice. For example, Bell argues that the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War Amendments to the U.S. Constitution are instances of interest convergence. In the first case, ending slavery was a means to the end of “saving the union”; in the second case, the amendments helped the Republicans maintain control of Congress. However, these instances of interest convergence were followed by two instances of racial sacrifice: the Tilden-Hayes compromise, which ended Reconstruction, and the disenfranchisement of Black voters in the South, which prevented Black voters from influencing elections in those states.
For Bell, the most important example of interest convergence is the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled that racial segregation is unconstitutional. Bell originally argued this in his 1980 paper “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” where he posited that the Court’s decision resulted not from a moral concern about Black well-being under Jim Crow regimes but from three international and domestic interests. Internationally, the U.S. needed to end segregation because it embarrassed the country on the world stage and undermined Cold War imperatives. Bell’s thesis was later corroborated by historian Mary Dudziak, who demonstrated that the Supreme Court wanted to end segregation because the Soviet Union and Third World anticolonial movements were using Jim Crow to criticize Amerika. Domestically, the U.S. needed to end segregation because it needed to gain Black support for Cold War foreign policy and because segregation was viewed as a barrier to industrialization in the South.
Thus, Bell’s materialism inspires his theory of racial fortuity, which interprets even the most celebrated events of Amerikan racial history as cynical decisions designed to advance capitalists and imperialist ends.
The second theme in Bell’s CRT is realism, which provides the basis for his theory of racial realism. Bell’s realism begins with an emphasis on the empirical realities of Black people in Amerika. On this view, CRT politics beings with historical and sociological descriptions about what is rather than with idealistic hopes about what might be. But for Bell, when we examine the patterns of racial fortuity in Amerikan history, we should reach the obvious conclusion: there is no empirical reason to believe that racism and white supremacy will ever come to an end in Amerika. In other words, U.S. history suggests that racism is permanent and racial equality is impossible. To be sure, Bell does not mean that racism is an ahistorical or eternal phenomenon; rather, he says that nothing in Amerikan history would make any reasonable person believe that racism will end in the U.S.
Bell has gotten a lot of heat from critics who claim that racial realism leads to inaction, pessimism, and fatalism. But Bell argues that the problem is not the struggle but the aim of the struggle. Too much energy and too many resources, Bell writes, have been wasted chasing the unrealistic goal of racial equality. But that just means that the struggle should aim for something else. As Bell writes in his famous 1992 essay “Racial Realism,” “Racial Realism…requires us to acknowledge the permanence of our subordinate status. That acknowledgement enables us to avoid despair, and frees us to imagine and implement racial strategies that can bring fulfillment and even triumph.” In his follow-up book Afrolantica Legacies, Bell lays out seven “rules of racial preservation,” guidelines designed to help Black people survive and even thrive in a perpetually white supremacist empire.
Thus, Bell’s realism inspires his theory of racial realism, which views Amerikan society as permanently racist and which advocates survival strategies as a more effective and realistic alternative to traditional civil rights calls for racial equality.
The third theme in Bell’s CRT is anticolonialism, which provides the basis for his critique of the Black middle class. In Afrolantica Legacies, Bell draws upon Robert L. Allen’s Black Awakening in Capitalist America, which argues that the elite of the 1960s were implementing a program of “domestic neocolonialism.” According to Allen, the white Amerikan elite were happy to integrate politically convective middle class Blacks into the power structure because it would protect the status quo from accusations of racism while giving those same middle class Blacks a stake in the system. By becoming beneficiaries of the Amerikan capitalist empire, Black middle class citizens were increasingly likely to identify with and defend it.
Following Allen, Bell explains neocolonialism and the class role the Black bourgeoisie plays in a neocolonial regime: “The colonizing countries maintained their control by establishing class divisions within the ranks of the indigenous peoples. A few able (and safe) individuals were permitted to move up in the ranks where they served as symbols of what was possible for the subordinated masses. In this, and less enviable ways, these individuals provide a legitimacy to the colonial rule that it clearly did not deserve.”
Bell levels a class critique against the Black bourgeoisie, whom he sees as having led Black political protest down the wrong path time and time again. He criticizes NAACP lawyers for advancing the organization’s demand for integrated schools at the expense of their constituents’ demands for better Black schools. He condemns high-profile conservative Black politicians and judges, such as Clarence Thomas, referring to them as “overseers.”
Bell even directs some of this criticism toward himself. As a member of the middle class Black intelligentsia, Bell fears he and others like him reinforce the myth of racial progress merely by accepting prestigious academic appointments. “Instead of gaining access to real influence,” he writes in Afrolantica Legacies, “it is more likely that we are legitimizing a system that relegates us to an ineffectual but decorative fringe.” While Bell wanted to use his legal training and racial consciousness to improve Black life, he worried that he might inadvertently be just another neocolonial stooge.
Thus, Bell’s anticolonialism inspires his class critique of the Black bourgeoisie, causing him to be wary of Black middle class efforts to integrate themselves into, and thereby validate, the existing white-capitalist power structure.
This brief overview of Bell’s philosophy should make it clear to even the most casual observer that his version of CRT stands in stark contrast to the liberal versions of CRT now proliferating in corporate newsrooms, the halls of academia, and the lobby of the Pentagon.
In fact, Bell’s Black radical CRT can be used to understand and explain the rise of liberal CRT at this moment. The now-popular liberal CRT is advanced primarily by upper middle class Black intellectuals and journalists, on one hand, and politically liberal whites, on the other. Such CRT expresses its demands in the language of morality and justice. And, at least rhetorically, such CRT holds out hope that, one day, racial equality might be achieved in “America.” Here we have a neocolonial Black bourgeoisie seeking interest convergence with liberal whites so both parties can hold onto their power and economic status in the face of a wave of Trump-led right-wing reaction, all while continuing to propagate the myths of “American Exceptionalism.”
Derrick Bell’s CRT, the original articulation of Critical Race Theory, is far too radical for mainstream Amerika—especially those parties who have a stake in perpetuating the status quo and those parties who seek access to power without challenging capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. Given the diametrical opposition between Bell’s CRT and contemporary liberal-patriotic CRT, it comes as no surprise that Bell is missing from the debate. For if Bell’s philosophy became part of the debate, the establishment functionaries who claim to carry the mantle of CRT today would be exposed for the pseudo-radical frauds that they are.
Monthly Review does not necessarily adhere to all of the views conveyed in articles republished at MR Online. Our goal is to share a variety of left perspectives that we think our readers will find interesting or useful. —Eds.
About Patrick AndersonPatrick D. Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Central State University. His research focuses on the Anticolonial Tradition of Black Radical Thought and the connections between technology, ethics, and imperialism. In addition to contributing to Mint Press News and Black Agenda Report, Patrick is editor at the WikiLeaks Bibliography . He can be reached at panderson@centralstate.edu
Critical Race Theory (CRT)Derrick BellPart 1
Law, code and exploitation
Solely because of the increasing disorder: The Thirty-Sixth Newsletter (2021)
Also by Patrick Anderson
The theory of intersectionality emerges out of racist, colonialist ideology, not radical politics—Rethinking the CRT Debate Part 3 by Patrick Anderson September 13, 2021
The conspicuous absence of Derrick Bell—rethinking the CRT debate, Part 1 by Patrick Anderson September 10, 2021
Realism, idealism, and the deradicalization of Critical Race Theory—Rethinking The CRT Debate, Part 2
RaceUnited StatesNewswireCritical Race Theory (CRT), Derrick Bell, Part 2, Richard Delgado
Recent debates about Critical Race Theory (CRT) have been abysmally uninformed at best and utterly inaccurate at worst. From corporate media and right-wing rags to independent left media, almost everyone has misrepresented or misunderstood the origins, histories, and theories of what is today known as CRT. This three-part series corrects these misunderstandings. Part 1 provides an overview of works of Derrick Bell, the “father of critical race theory.” Part 2 provides a detailed intellectual history of CRT. Part 3 presents a critique of intersectionality as an idealist, liberal iteration of CRT.
Critical Race Theory (CRT) is among the most hotly contested topics of 2021, but no one seems interested in the history of this intellectual tradition. To be sure, one can find the most superficial explanation of “what CRT is” in almost any magazine or newspaper. The New York Times, for instance, recently published an article promising to provide “a brief history” of CRT—oddly enough, something the author forgot to do. The problem is that all such accounts rarely move past naming a few relevant names from legal studies and listing a few principles that are so general they could refer to any number of intellectual paradigms.
Recent discussions on the left have focused on debunking insipid conservatives’ perspectives on CRT, but this is low-hanging fruit. The most difficult challenge lies in debunking the liberal narrative about CRT, a task that can only be achieved through careful historical analysis.
To truly understand the current state of CRT, it is necessary to understand the difference between the realist school of CRT and the idealist school of CRT. Furthermore, it is necessary to acknowledge the historical process by which the realist school of CRT—the original school of critical race theory—was gradually displaced and replaced by the idealist school of CRT. Today, the realist school is so small and marginalized that the paradigms of the idealist school of CRT pass for CRT as such.
Richard Delgado—who, alongside Derrick Bell, is one of the founders of the Critical Race Theory tradition—explains the distinction between realist and idealist versions of CRT.
As Delgado writes, the idealist school of CRT “holds that race and discrimination are largely functions of attitude and social formation. For these thinkers, race is a social construction created out of words, symbols, stereotypes, and categories. As such, we may purge discrimination by ridding ourselves of the texts, narratives, ideas, and meanings that give rise to it and that convey the message that people of other racial groups are unworthy, lazy, and dangerous. These writers analyze hate speech, media images, census categories, and such issues as intersectionality and essentialism. They analyze unconscious or institutional racism and show how cognitive theory exposes a host of preconceptions, baselines, and mindsets that operate below the level of consciousness to render certain people consistently one-down.”
By contrast, the realist school of CRT argues that “racism is a means by which our system allocates privilege, status, and wealth. They point out that the West did not demonize black or native populations until it determined to conquer and exploit them, and that media images in every period shift to accommodate the interests of the majority group, now for reassurance, now for vindication. Racial realists examine the role of international relations and competition, the interests of elite groups, and the changing demands of the labor market in hopes of understanding the twists and turns of racial fortunes, including the part the legal system plays in that history.”
The difference, then, between realist and idealist approaches to CRT is clear. While the realists argue that economic structures are the foundations for structural racism and that economic interests are the primary motivating factor when it comes to white and elite racism, the idealists argue that racism is largely a function of language, symbols, and psychology. While the realists view domestic structural racism as a manifestation of the patterns of U.S. empire and capitalism, the idealists view racism as a psychological deficiency of whites that prevents (middle class) non-whites from joining imperialist and capitalist institutions. Realists do not deny the importance of language, symbols, and psychology, but as Delgado notes, for the realists, “material factors such as profits and the labor market are even more decisive in determining who falls where in that system.”
Despite its philosophical importance, the realist/idealist distinction within CRT is completely missing from the current debate. For instance, many contemporary media accounts of CRT rely upon the book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, which is authored by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Like Delgado’s other works, the realist/idealist distinction is prominently discussed in this introductory text, yet every media outlet that cites this text in its articles on CRT neglects this realist/idealist distinction.
To be sure, there are immediate economic and political reasons why this is the case. Both liberal media outlets and right-wing media outlets erase the realist/idealist distinction because they want contemporary CRT to appear more radical than it actually is. Liberals want CRT to appear more radical so they can trick leftists into joining their Democratic Party coalition; conservatives want CRT to appear more radical so they can fear monger their reactionary audiences with a make-believe boogieman. But there are also historical and intellectual reasons for this erasure as well.
Two trends in the history of CRT explain why the realist school of CRT is completely missing from the current debate. First, as Delgado explains, there is the fact that university deans and wealthy donors sought to de-radicalize CRT by funding idealist CRT scholarship and defunding realist CRT scholarship. The realist school of CRT dominated the movement’s first two decades, roughly from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. But as CRT gained academic legitimacy in the mid-1990s, the idealist school, which emerged in the late 1980s, began to grow. By the early 2000s, the idealist school had almost completely overtaken CRT intellectual circles.
The process by which idealism came to dominate CRT can be found in the publication record. In 1995, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement—the first major collection of foundational CRT writings—was published. While this anthology features an approximate balance between realist and idealist CRT scholarship, CRT’s realist roots are firmly acknowledged. As Cornel West writes in his Foreword to the collection, “When Derrick Bell, Jr. began to question the basic assumptions of the law’s treatment of people of color in the leading law reviews—the essays that open this collection—he was virtually the lone dissenter in the arena of legal scholarship.”
By 2003, when Crossroads, Directions, and a New Critical Race Theory was published, realism had been completely excised from the CRT movement. Delgado criticized the book, arguing that “Ideas, words, categories, and symbols [had] replaced nationalism, interest convergence, history, and similar tools that had served as Critical Race Theory’s stock in trade until then.” Instead, collection features jargon-heavy essays by academics writing about their tenure struggles and white authors apologetically joining the conversation. The entire collection was about individual psychologies, not social structures.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, who has been treated as the foremost authority on CRT as of late, embraced this idealist turn, expressing her hope that, in ten or twenty years time, the CRT movement might hold an event titled “Discursive Disobedience: Critical Race Theory Stages a Virtual Sit-In in American Consciousness.”
For Delgado, this “idealist turn” in CRT (to borrow a phrase from Tommy Curry) was the product of reactionary financial and political interests. Money began to flow into CRT scholarship, publications, conferences, and tenure-track faculty appointments, but only those scholars who were deemed non-threatening and only that scholarship that was deemed politically appropriate received such funding. As Delgado pointedly asks:
Might it be the lure of easy publication, not to mention that of attending an annual conference where one might meet one’s friends and relax in spa like splendor, that accounts for the proliferation of discourse scholarship during the period in question? And, from the dean’s perspective, is it not safer to fund scholarship that examines literary tropes than that which has the effrontery to propose that America’s proudest moment—Brown v. Board of Education—came about because white folks decided to do themselves a favor?
The use of university funds and endowments to de-radicalize scholarship was nothing new. As early as 1974, Robert L. Allen observed white-controlled financial interests interfering with and undermining the autonomy of Black Studies departments. As he explains: “By selecting certain programs for funding while denying support to others, government agencies and foundations could manipulate the political orientation of these programs and the direction of academic research… Departments which were thought by the establishment to be dangerously independent or radical could thus be crippled or destroyed without the necessity of resorting to violent repression.” Delgado simply observed the same phenomenon happening to CRT in the 1990s.
In addition to the financially-motivated de-radicalization of CRT, there is a second trends in the history of CRT that explains why the realist school of CRT is completely missing from the discussion today. In “Will the Real CRT Please Stand Up?,” philosopher Tommy J. Curry shows that the term “Critical Race Theory”—which originally referred to a distinct intellectual movement in legal studies, rooted in the work of Derrick Bell—was hijacked by philosophers and used as a slogan to market any scholarship that “critically” examined the phenomenon of “race.” In 1990, the term “Critical Race Theory” referred only to the tradition of legal scholarship that examined the relationship between structural racism and the law; by the early 2000s, the term “Critical Race Theory” was being used to describe nearly any paradigm or theory that examined race, from early-nineteenth century views to contemporary social contract theory and phenomenology. In other words, during the same period in which the idealist school eclipsed the realist school in the field of legal studies, the term “Critical Race Theory” was increasingly used to describe almost any scholarship that took an interest in race, no matter its methodology.
Let’s recap this history: CRT originated in the realist scholarship of Derrick Bell and Richard Delgado, who argued that structural racism is grounded in economics and racist attitudes motivated by economic self-interest. Later on, an idealist school of CRT emerged, focusing on language and discourse as the primary cite of racial conflict. Because idealist CRT was perceived as less threatening to the ruling political, economic, and academic powers that be, the idealist school was promoted and funded at the expense of the realist school. Simultaneously, as the term “Critical Race Theory” transformed into a valuable marketing tool for emerging philosophical scholarship, the term gradually lost its grounding in the CRT tradition of legal studies. By the start of this century, the phrase “Critical Race Theory” no longer had anything to do with its racial realist origins.
The history of CRT presented here provides a much-needed corrective to the explanations of CRT as they currently appear in the media. For example, in CNN’s extremely unhelpful and inappropriately titled article “What critical race theory is—and isn’t,” author Faith Karimi explains that Critical Race Theory is “a concept that’s been around for decades and that seeks to understand and address inequality and racism in the US.” “Critical race theory recognizes that systemic racism is part of American society and challenges the beliefs that allow it to flourish,” she adds.
It is difficult to get more benign that that. Not only does Karimi’s description of CRT overlook the realist/idealist division in CRT, it presents CRT as just another theory of race in America. This approach, however, fails to capture the original distinctiveness of CRT as a theoretical and philosophical paradigm. As Curry reminds us, “CRT’s theoretical distinctiveness does not reside in its general interest in the study of race, but rather in the approach and descriptive foundations that lie beneath CRT’s encounter with racism in American society. Because racism is taken to be permanent, CRT maintains that very different strategies be utilized to combat whiteness.” Yet Karimi and CNN can publish such vapid explanations because, under the obfuscated of the realist/idealist debate, the idealist schools become synonymous with CRT—and the realist schools is all but erased from the historical and intellectual record.
Similarly, Pascal Robert and Paul Mocombe recently argued that CRT originated in the poststructuralism and postmodernism of Critical Legal Studies. While this might be true of much of the scholarship produced by theorists of the idealist tradition of CRT, it would be patently false to claim that the realist school of CRT shares the same origins.
Understanding the realist CRT and idealist CRT difference also helps us untangle the contradictions within progressive responses to right-wing attacks on CRT. For instance, in the recent essay “The War on Critical Race Theory,” David Theo Goldberg helpfully debunks many of the conservative myths regarding CRT, but in the process of debunking such myths, Goldberg distorts the historical development of CRT and thus theoretically overlooks its most radical theoretical insights and political positions.
First, Goldberg complains that “CRT functions for the right today primarily as an empty signifier for any talk of race and racism at all.” But as Curry’s history reveals, liberal Black philosophers of the 1990s were the first ones responsible for taking the phrase “Critical Race Theory” out of its original context and turning it into an “empty signifier for any talk of race and racism.”
Second, while Goldberg acknowledges that CRT scholars are “varied in their views,” he obfuscates the realist/idealist distinction within CRT. Like CNN’s Karimi, he simply states that “what unites the work of these [CRT] scholars is a shared sense of the importance of attending explicitly to race in legal argument,” as if methodology is of secondary importance.
But politically speaking, methodology is of central importance when it comes to understanding the orientation of contemporary CRT. In the eyes of a CRT realist, the patterns of U.S. history suggest that racial equality will never be achieved in Amerika, which means racial survival ought to be the central aim of activism. In the eyes of a CRT idealist, history only matters insofar as Amerikan society has not yet fully resolved the problem of inequality, a problem that can be overcome if language changes, symbols are modified, and minds are educated. CRT realists reject Amerikan Exceptionalism, while CRT idealists revel in it.
Thus, despite all the talk about how the right-wing media does not understand CRT, the real threat here is the liberal and corporate media’s failure or inability to explain the history of CRT. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting recently argued that “Right-wing commentators claim to know what CRT is, while showing no interest in engaging with its ideas, and only very rarely quote the words of its proponents. Instead, they’ve deliberately manufactured a set of caricatures to make the public—mainly the white public—feel threatened.”
Yet the disparity between liberal explanations of CRT and the history offered here proves that we can paraphrase that statement to be just as (or even more) true: Liberal commentators claim to know what CRT is, while showing no interest in engaging with its ideas, and only very rarely quote the words of its proponents other than Kimberlé Crenshaw. Instead, they’ve deliberately manufactured a set of caricatures to make the public—mainly the white public—feel safe.
In the end, acknowledging the realist/idealist division in CRT helps us makes sense of the fact that contemporary CRT has been sanctioned by the most reactionary institutions of the Amerikan Empire—CNN, the Pentagon, and the like. Indeed, if CRT was a singular phenomenon, a monolithic school of thought, then its acceptance in the Great Halls of Empire would be grounds for rejecting it outright. But history reveals that it is not CRT as such but the idealist school of CRT that has become the newest ideological tool of Empire. While not completely defunct, the realist school of CRT occupies no place in the current debate. Following the idealist turn in CRT during the 1990s, CRT realism was marginalized, deemed unfit for a liberal academy with an imperial agenda. While the realist school of CRT was never going to achieve mainstream acceptance because it violates the imperatives of Amerikan Exceptionalism, the idealist school of CRT has now provided Amerikan Exceptionalism a much-needed booster shot.
In his Afterword to Crossroads, Directions, and a New Critical Race Theory, Derrick Bell warned:
If the lives of those we most respect are any indication, our effectiveness may best be measured by the mainstream’s rejection. Certainly, too much public recognition may be cause for concern and a re-examination of our goals. The desire for general acceptance—to have our writing read by means rather than the faithful few—is normal. But in striving for readership, the temptation is ever present to soften our critiques and rationalize rather than rant against the injustices in our midst.
Graciously, Bell did not condemn his idealist counterparts in this short text, but his warning provides much needed insight. Juxtaposing realism’s mainstream rejection with idealism’s mainstream acceptance tells us all we need to know about which tradition of CRT to take seriously and which to eschew. The master’s tools may or may not dismantle the master’s house, but when the master begins repairing his house using the servant’s tools, the servant would be wise to seek out new instruments of liberation.
This series on CRT is dedicated to Glen Ford, who was a deeply inspirational revolutionary thinker and who will always have my utmost admiration and appreciation. Thank you, Glen.
Monthly Review does not necessarily adhere to all of the views conveyed in articles republished at MR Online. Our goal is to share a variety of left perspectives that we think our readers will find interesting or useful. —Eds.
Critical Race Theory (CRT)Derrick BellPart 2Richard Delgado
The theory of intersectionality emerges out of racist, colonialist ideology, not radical politics—
Recent debates about Critical Race Theory (CRT) have been abysmally uninformed at best and utterly inaccurate at worst. From corporate media and right-wing rags to independent left media, almost everyone has misrepresented or misunderstood the origins, histories, and theories of what is today known as CRT. This three-part series corrects these misunderstandings. Part 1 provides an overview of works of Derrick Bell, the “father of critical race theory.” Part 2 provides a detailed intellectual history of CRT. Part 3 presents a critique of intersectionality as an idealist, liberal iteration of CRT.
Critical Race Theory (CRT) is among the most hotly contested topics of 2021, but no one seems interested in the history of this intellectual tradition. To be sure, one can find the most superficial explanation of “what CRT is” in almost any magazine or newspaper. The New York Times, for instance, recently published an article promising to provide “a brief history” of CRT—oddly enough, something the author forgot to do. The problem is that all such accounts rarely move past naming a few relevant names from legal studies and listing a few principles that are so general they could refer to any number of intellectual paradigms.
Recent discussions on the left have focused on debunking insipid conservatives’ perspectives on CRT, but this is low-hanging fruit. The most difficult challenge lies in debunking the liberal narrative about CRT, a task that can only be achieved through careful historical analysis.
To truly understand the current state of CRT, it is necessary to understand the difference between the realist school of CRT and the idealist school of CRT. Furthermore, it is necessary to acknowledge the historical process by which the realist school of CRT—the original school of critical race theory—was gradually displaced and replaced by the idealist school of CRT. Today, the realist school is so small and marginalized that the paradigms of the idealist school of CRT pass for CRT as such.
Richard Delgado—who, alongside Derrick Bell, is one of the founders of the Critical Race Theory tradition—explains the distinction between realist and idealist versions of CRT.
As Delgado writes, the idealist school of CRT “holds that race and discrimination are largely functions of attitude and social formation. For these thinkers, race is a social construction created out of words, symbols, stereotypes, and categories. As such, we may purge discrimination by ridding ourselves of the texts, narratives, ideas, and meanings that give rise to it and that convey the message that people of other racial groups are unworthy, lazy, and dangerous. These writers analyze hate speech, media images, census categories, and such issues as intersectionality and essentialism. They analyze unconscious or institutional racism and show how cognitive theory exposes a host of preconceptions, baselines, and mindsets that operate below the level of consciousness to render certain people consistently one-down.”
By contrast, the realist school of CRT argues that “racism is a means by which our system allocates privilege, status, and wealth. They point out that the West did not demonize black or native populations until it determined to conquer and exploit them, and that media images in every period shift to accommodate the interests of the majority group, now for reassurance, now for vindication. Racial realists examine the role of international relations and competition, the interests of elite groups, and the changing demands of the labor market in hopes of understanding the twists and turns of racial fortunes, including the part the legal system plays in that history.”
The difference, then, between realist and idealist approaches to CRT is clear. While the realists argue that economic structures are the foundations for structural racism and that economic interests are the primary motivating factor when it comes to white and elite racism, the idealists argue that racism is largely a function of language, symbols, and psychology. While the realists view domestic structural racism as a manifestation of the patterns of U.S. empire and capitalism, the idealists view racism as a psychological deficiency of whites that prevents (middle class) non-whites from joining imperialist and capitalist institutions. Realists do not deny the importance of language, symbols, and psychology, but as Delgado notes, for the realists, “material factors such as profits and the labor market are even more decisive in determining who falls where in that system.”
Despite its philosophical importance, the realist/idealist distinction within CRT is completely missing from the current debate. For instance, many contemporary media accounts of CRT rely upon the book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, which is authored by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Like Delgado’s other works, the realist/idealist distinction is prominently discussed in this introductory text, yet every media outlet that cites this text in its articles on CRT neglects this realist/idealist distinction.
To be sure, there are immediate economic and political reasons why this is the case. Both liberal media outlets and right-wing media outlets erase the realist/idealist distinction because they want contemporary CRT to appear more radical than it actually is. Liberals want CRT to appear more radical so they can trick leftists into joining their Democratic Party coalition; conservatives want CRT to appear more radical so they can fear monger their reactionary audiences with a make-believe boogieman. But there are also historical and intellectual reasons for this erasure as well.
Two trends in the history of CRT explain why the realist school of CRT is completely missing from the current debate. First, as Delgado explains, there is the fact that university deans and wealthy donors sought to de-radicalize CRT by funding idealist CRT scholarship and defunding realist CRT scholarship. The realist school of CRT dominated the movement’s first two decades, roughly from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. But as CRT gained academic legitimacy in the mid-1990s, the idealist school, which emerged in the late 1980s, began to grow. By the early 2000s, the idealist school had almost completely overtaken CRT intellectual circles.
The process by which idealism came to dominate CRT can be found in the publication record. In 1995, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement—the first major collection of foundational CRT writings—was published. While this anthology features an approximate balance between realist and idealist CRT scholarship, CRT’s realist roots are firmly acknowledged. As Cornel West writes in his Foreword to the collection, “When Derrick Bell, Jr. began to question the basic assumptions of the law’s treatment of people of color in the leading law reviews—the essays that open this collection—he was virtually the lone dissenter in the arena of legal scholarship.”
By 2003, when Crossroads, Directions, and a New Critical Race Theory was published, realism had been completely excised from the CRT movement. Delgado criticized the book, arguing that “Ideas, words, categories, and symbols [had] replaced nationalism, interest convergence, history, and similar tools that had served as Critical Race Theory’s stock in trade until then.” Instead, collection features jargon-heavy essays by academics writing about their tenure struggles and white authors apologetically joining the conversation. The entire collection was about individual psychologies, not social structures.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, who has been treated as the foremost authority on CRT as of late, embraced this idealist turn, expressing her hope that, in ten or twenty years time, the CRT movement might hold an event titled “Discursive Disobedience: Critical Race Theory Stages a Virtual Sit-In in American Consciousness.”
For Delgado, this “idealist turn” in CRT (to borrow a phrase from Tommy Curry) was the product of reactionary financial and political interests. Money began to flow into CRT scholarship, publications, conferences, and tenure-track faculty appointments, but only those scholars who were deemed non-threatening and only that scholarship that was deemed politically appropriate received such funding. As Delgado pointedly asks:
Might it be the lure of easy publication, not to mention that of attending an annual conference where one might meet one’s friends and relax in spa like splendor, that accounts for the proliferation of discourse scholarship during the period in question? And, from the dean’s perspective, is it not safer to fund scholarship that examines literary tropes than that which has the effrontery to propose that America’s proudest moment—Brown v. Board of Education—came about because white folks decided to do themselves a favor?
The use of university funds and endowments to de-radicalize scholarship was nothing new. As early as 1974, Robert L. Allen observed white-controlled financial interests interfering with and undermining the autonomy of Black Studies departments. As he explains: “By selecting certain programs for funding while denying support to others, government agencies and foundations could manipulate the political orientation of these programs and the direction of academic research… Departments which were thought by the establishment to be dangerously independent or radical could thus be crippled or destroyed without the necessity of resorting to violent repression.” Delgado simply observed the same phenomenon happening to CRT in the 1990s.
In addition to the financially-motivated de-radicalization of CRT, there is a second trends in the history of CRT that explains why the realist school of CRT is completely missing from the discussion today. In “Will the Real CRT Please Stand Up?,” philosopher Tommy J. Curry shows that the term “Critical Race Theory”—which originally referred to a distinct intellectual movement in legal studies, rooted in the work of Derrick Bell—was hijacked by philosophers and used as a slogan to market any scholarship that “critically” examined the phenomenon of “race.” In 1990, the term “Critical Race Theory” referred only to the tradition of legal scholarship that examined the relationship between structural racism and the law; by the early 2000s, the term “Critical Race Theory” was being used to describe nearly any paradigm or theory that examined race, from early-nineteenth century views to contemporary social contract theory and phenomenology. In other words, during the same period in which the idealist school eclipsed the realist school in the field of legal studies, the term “Critical Race Theory” was increasingly used to describe almost any scholarship that took an interest in race, no matter its methodology.
Let’s recap this history: CRT originated in the realist scholarship of Derrick Bell and Richard Delgado, who argued that structural racism is grounded in economics and racist attitudes motivated by economic self-interest. Later on, an idealist school of CRT emerged, focusing on language and discourse as the primary cite of racial conflict. Because idealist CRT was perceived as less threatening to the ruling political, economic, and academic powers that be, the idealist school was promoted and funded at the expense of the realist school. Simultaneously, as the term “Critical Race Theory” transformed into a valuable marketing tool for emerging philosophical scholarship, the term gradually lost its grounding in the CRT tradition of legal studies. By the start of this century, the phrase “Critical Race Theory” no longer had anything to do with its racial realist origins.
The history of CRT presented here provides a much-needed corrective to the explanations of CRT as they currently appear in the media. For example, in CNN’s extremely unhelpful and inappropriately titled article “What critical race theory is—and isn’t,” author Faith Karimi explains that Critical Race Theory is “a concept that’s been around for decades and that seeks to understand and address inequality and racism in the US.” “Critical race theory recognizes that systemic racism is part of American society and challenges the beliefs that allow it to flourish,” she adds.
It is difficult to get more benign that that. Not only does Karimi’s description of CRT overlook the realist/idealist division in CRT, it presents CRT as just another theory of race in America. This approach, however, fails to capture the original distinctiveness of CRT as a theoretical and philosophical paradigm. As Curry reminds us, “CRT’s theoretical distinctiveness does not reside in its general interest in the study of race, but rather in the approach and descriptive foundations that lie beneath CRT’s encounter with racism in American society. Because racism is taken to be permanent, CRT maintains that very different strategies be utilized to combat whiteness.” Yet Karimi and CNN can publish such vapid explanations because, under the obfuscated of the realist/idealist debate, the idealist schools become synonymous with CRT—and the realist schools is all but erased from the historical and intellectual record.
Similarly, Pascal Robert and Paul Mocombe recently argued that CRT originated in the poststructuralism and postmodernism of Critical Legal Studies. While this might be true of much of the scholarship produced by theorists of the idealist tradition of CRT, it would be patently false to claim that the realist school of CRT shares the same origins.
Understanding the realist CRT and idealist CRT difference also helps us untangle the contradictions within progressive responses to right-wing attacks on CRT. For instance, in the recent essay “The War on Critical Race Theory,” David Theo Goldberg helpfully debunks many of the conservative myths regarding CRT, but in the process of debunking such myths, Goldberg distorts the historical development of CRT and thus theoretically overlooks its most radical theoretical insights and political positions.
First, Goldberg complains that “CRT functions for the right today primarily as an empty signifier for any talk of race and racism at all.” But as Curry’s history reveals, liberal Black philosophers of the 1990s were the first ones responsible for taking the phrase “Critical Race Theory” out of its original context and turning it into an “empty signifier for any talk of race and racism.”
Second, while Goldberg acknowledges that CRT scholars are “varied in their views,” he obfuscates the realist/idealist distinction within CRT. Like CNN’s Karimi, he simply states that “what unites the work of these [CRT] scholars is a shared sense of the importance of attending explicitly to race in legal argument,” as if methodology is of secondary importance.
But politically speaking, methodology is of central importance when it comes to understanding the orientation of contemporary CRT. In the eyes of a CRT realist, the patterns of U.S. history suggest that racial equality will never be achieved in Amerika, which means racial survival ought to be the central aim of activism. In the eyes of a CRT idealist, history only matters insofar as Amerikan society has not yet fully resolved the problem of inequality, a problem that can be overcome if language changes, symbols are modified, and minds are educated. CRT realists reject Amerikan Exceptionalism, while CRT idealists revel in it.
Thus, despite all the talk about how the right-wing media does not understand CRT, the real threat here is the liberal and corporate media’s failure or inability to explain the history of CRT. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting recently argued that “Right-wing commentators claim to know what CRT is, while showing no interest in engaging with its ideas, and only very rarely quote the words of its proponents. Instead, they’ve deliberately manufactured a set of caricatures to make the public—mainly the white public—feel threatened.”
Yet the disparity between liberal explanations of CRT and the history offered here proves that we can paraphrase that statement to be just as (or even more) true: Liberal commentators claim to know what CRT is, while showing no interest in engaging with its ideas, and only very rarely quote the words of its proponents other than Kimberlé Crenshaw. Instead, they’ve deliberately manufactured a set of caricatures to make the public—mainly the white public—feel safe.
In the end, acknowledging the realist/idealist division in CRT helps us makes sense of the fact that contemporary CRT has been sanctioned by the most reactionary institutions of the Amerikan Empire—CNN, the Pentagon, and the like. Indeed, if CRT was a singular phenomenon, a monolithic school of thought, then its acceptance in the Great Halls of Empire would be grounds for rejecting it outright. But history reveals that it is not CRT as such but the idealist school of CRT that has become the newest ideological tool of Empire. While not completely defunct, the realist school of CRT occupies no place in the current debate. Following the idealist turn in CRT during the 1990s, CRT realism was marginalized, deemed unfit for a liberal academy with an imperial agenda. While the realist school of CRT was never going to achieve mainstream acceptance because it violates the imperatives of Amerikan Exceptionalism, the idealist school of CRT has now provided Amerikan Exceptionalism a much-needed booster shot.
In his Afterword to Crossroads, Directions, and a New Critical Race Theory, Derrick Bell warned:
If the lives of those we most respect are any indication, our effectiveness may best be measured by the mainstream’s rejection. Certainly, too much public recognition may be cause for concern and a re-examination of our goals. The desire for general acceptance—to have our writing read by means rather than the faithful few—is normal. But in striving for readership, the temptation is ever present to soften our critiques and rationalize rather than rant against the injustices in our midst.
Graciously, Bell did not condemn his idealist counterparts in this short text, but his warning provides much needed insight. Juxtaposing realism’s mainstream rejection with idealism’s mainstream acceptance tells us all we need to know about which tradition of CRT to take seriously and which to eschew. The master’s tools may or may not dismantle the master’s house, but when the master begins repairing his house using the servant’s tools, the servant would be wise to seek out new instruments of liberation.
This series on CRT is dedicated to Glen Ford, who was a deeply inspirational revolutionary thinker and who will always have my utmost admiration and appreciation. Thank you, Glen.
Monthly Review does not necessarily adhere to all of the views conveyed in articles republished at MR Online. Our goal is to share a variety of left perspectives that we think our readers will find interesting or useful. —Eds.
Critical Race Theory (CRT)Derrick BellPart 2Richard Delgado
The theory of intersectionality emerges out of racist, colonialist ideology, not radical politics—
Rethinking the CRT Debate Part 3
Posted Sep 13, 2021 by Patrick Anderson
Originally published: Black Agenda Report (September 8, 2021 ) |
RaceUnited StatesNewswireCritical Race Theory (CRT), Kimberlé Crenshaw, part 3
Recent debates about Critical Race Theory (CRT) have been abysmally uninformed at best and utterly inaccurate at worst. From corporate media and right-wing rags to independent left media, almost everyone has misrepresented or misunderstood the origins, histories, and theories of what is today known as CRT. This three-part series corrects these misunderstandings. Part 1 provides an overview of works of Derrick Bell, the “father of critical race theory.” Part 2 provides a detailed intellectual history of CRT. Part 3 presents a critique of intersectionality as an idealist, liberal iteration of CRT.
***
The Critical Race Theory (CRT) frenzy has been in full swing for months now, and in the rush to make sense of this intellectual tradition, corporate media have repeatedly flocked to one individual more than any other to provide their account of CRT with the cover of authority and rigor. That person is Kimberlé Crenshaw, a legal scholar who is recognized as one of the founding figures of CRT and who is credited with coining the very term “critical race theory.”
Before the recent controversy over CRT, Crenshaw was predominantly known as the scholar responsible for coining the term “intersectionality” and providing intellectual orientation to a type of feminist theory that sought to account for race and gender simultaneously rather than separately, as intersectionality theorists have accused other social theories of doing.
Yet when the scholarly origins of Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality are excavated, it becomes clear that it is rooted not only in philosophical idealism but also in racist and colonialist ideology.
The first step in understanding Crenshaw’s version of CRT and the intellectual origins of intersectionality is to understand her as part of the idealist strain of CRT. Unlike the realist theorists of CRT, such as Derrick Bell, who place racism in an economic context, approach the study of racial histories from an empirical perspective, and present anti-colonial and anti-imperial critiques of Amerikan society, idealists like Crenshaw argue that racism is largely a psychological issue, a problem with white consciousness that is best addressed through education and the evolution of language and symbols. Idealists also tend to be more reformist than radical, preferring to claim so-called “American Values” as their own, rather than fundamentally question the nation’s imperial history and present.
Such idealism and reformism are both present in Crenshaw’s work. In her 1988 essay “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law,” a foundational text of the CRT tradition and one of Crenshaw’s earliest publications, Crenshaw unquestionably stakes out her political reformism and idealist methodological orientation. Much of the article is dedicated to criticizing the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) scholars of the day for neglecting the role of race in social oppression and for too quickly dismissing the utility of liberal legal reforms, including rights-based reforms, for Black people in the U.S.
As Crenshaw explains, CLS scholars wanted people to question the structure of society from the ground up, and according to the CLS writers, the only way to get people to question society in this way was to disabuse them of all the illusions of the liberal capitalist order. This process included disabusing the public of the idea that law is socially and politically neutral. For this generation of CLS scholars, if people continue to think that claiming rights is a viable strategy for liberation, then (as Crenshaw puts it) “the legitimacy of the entire order is never seriously questioned.”
According to Crenshaw, this radical demand to fundamentally question Amerikan society requires us to overlook “the transformative potential that liberalism offers.” Claiming that “People can demand change only in ways that reflect the logic of the institutions they are challenging,” Crenshaw concludes that a “pragmatic use of liberal ideology” can help protesters and scholars resolve the racial contradictions of Amerikan society and advance the cause of Black freedom by winning and defending Black “rights.”
How would such a transformation commence? In Crenshaw’s view, it “must begin with beliefs about Blacks in American society, and how these beliefs legitimize racial coercion,” especially white race consciousness. She distinguishes between “symbolic subordination,” which denies Blacks social and political equality, and “material subordination,” which denies Black economic, health, and other material benefits of society. Importantly, in a direct inversion of the materialism of realist CRT scholars like Bell, Crenshaw says that the former causes the latter: “Symbolic subordination often created material disadvantage by reinforcing race consciousness in everything from employment to education.” In other words, if we change white people’s minds and rid them of anti-Black ideas, material change will necessarily follow.
In Crenshaw’s idealist worldview, then, CRT is about demanding that “America” become what is (supposedly) truly is: a diverse and inclusive democracy. And this goal is achieved by using law strategically and teaching white people not to be racist. It is from within this idealist, reformist context that intersectionality emerged.
Since Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” approximately three decades ago, it has become a lexical staple of much left, progressive, and liberal politics. For most such groups today, those who refuse to be “intersectional” have morally failed to be properly inclusive and have epistemically failed to adopt the most advanced social scientific paradigm.
But behind the progressive veneer of intersectionality lies an unquestionable racist and colonialist intellectual history, a history that is only beginning to be excavated and acknowledged.
Crenshaw originally developed the theory of intersectionality in two law papers. In the first, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”(1989), Crenshaw sets out to solve a very specific legal problem, namely, that “women” and “Black” are considered protected classes under anti-discrimination law, but “Black women” are not. In a review of relevant court decisions, Crenshaw observed that the courts rejected Black women’s claims of discrimination unless they could show that they were victims of more general discriminatory practices against “women” as such (including white women) or against “Blacks” as such (including Black men). So to the courts, if Black women claimed racial discrimination but Black men in the same workplace did not, the case was dismissed. Likewise, if Black women claimed sex discrimination but white women in the same workplace did not, the case was dismissed. Crenshaw’s solution was to “acknowledge” that Black women had been and could be discriminated against as Black women. To remedy the problem, the law should account for the “intersection” of race and sex and make Black women a protected class distinct of women of other races or men of the same race. As a reformist legal strategy, intersectionality is not only a clever solution to the problem it is meant to address, but it is also consistent with Crenshaw’s overall liberal philosophical perspective.
However, intersectionality become seriously problematic in her follow-up paper, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color ” (1991), where Crenshaw attempts to take intersectionality out of the realm of law and transform it into a generalized theory of society. The basic assumption of intersectionality is that all “previous” theories are “single-axis” that account for only one dimension of oppression at a time. Feminism accounts for sex or gender. Critical Race Theory (of the original realist school) accounts for race. And Marxism account for class. The innovation of intersectionality, as we are told, is that it brings together the insights of these theories to account for “race, gender, and class” simultaneously (though class is never present in so-called intersectional analyses). And notice the title: intersectionality is no longer about Black women; it is now about that ever-nebulous and ill-defined group “women of color.”
Notwithstanding the absurdity of the claim that Feminism, Marxism, and realist CRT are “single-axis” theories in the way that Crenshaw describes them, there are even more problematic aspects of intersectionality, problems that originate in the history of feminism. Drawing on the recent scholarship of philosopher Tommy Curry, we can trace out the racist and colonialist origins of intersectionality.
Crenshaw’s “gender” analysis is derived from her reliance on the work of Catherine MacKinnon, a leading second wave feminist legal scholar who argued that the basic power dynamic of society is grounded in sex difference. This male dominance theory claimed that, in Amerikan society, (all) men had structure power over (all) women. This structure is usually called patriarchy. Crenshaw believed that MacKinnon’s male dominance theory provided a theory of sex domination similar to Derrick Bell’s realist CRT theory of racial domination, which posits that the basic power dynamic is white over Black, and perhaps other racial minorities. Even though the basic assumptions of MacKinnon and Bell’s respective theories are fundamentally contradictory, Crenshaw sought to combine them. This contradiction has never been resolved, which is why so many scholars and intellectual today claim that neither race nor gender is “foundational.” Such platitudes merely allow the speaker to leave the contradiction within intersectionality unresolved.
The interesting thing is that this theory of patriarchy, this idea that all men have power over all women, was invented by white women in the 1950s to claim that they were just as oppressed as Black men in a society run by white supremacy. In books and essays including Alva Myrdal’s “A Parallel to the Negro Problem” (1944), Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), and Helen Hacker’s “Women as a Minority Group” (1955), white women scholars observed the conditions of Black men under western colonialism and racism and said: white women should think of themselves as a similarly oppressed group. Before the essays, white women were seen primarily as members of the dominant race, even by white women themselves. In fact, even white feminists saw themselves in this way, as historian Louise Michelle Newman demonstrates in her book White Women Rights. Yet in the 1950s, white women began to claim that they were oppressed in a manner analogous to Black men.
For the idea that “women” as such constituted an oppressed class subjected to “men” as such to become the dominant paradigm, feminists needed to discard the kinship theory of patriarchy.
Even into the 1970s and 1980s, feminist anthropologists and sociologists adopted the classical social science view that patriarchy had a familial and generational aspect to it. However, while this kinship view was compatible with the earlier theories that saw white women as part of the dominant racial group, it was incompatible with the idea that women constitute a singular coherent class of oppressed people. Why? Because if patriarchy depends on family relations, and Black people (especially Black men) are prohibited from joining the family relations of whites, then Black men cannot be members of a generally patriarchal class of “men.” The paradigm text where this argument is made is Sylvia Walby’s Theorizing Patriarchy (1990), which was published in the very same intellectual milieu and shared the same assumptions as MacKinnon’s male dominance theory.
As Curry summarizes, “the white woman used the body and experience of the Negro, specifically the Black man, as the template by which she created the idea that she was in fact a minority group despite the power and violence she imparted on racial and ethnic groups such as Blacks and Jews.” Curry adds that “the definition of patriarchy that emerged from these debates were driven by the need white feminists had in constructing themselves as a class external to—and victimized by—white patriarchy. The feminist definition of patriarchy was constructed to protect feminist ideology, not to explain the oppression of various groups throughout history.”
Thus, Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality relies on a paradigm of feminist ideology that constructed by white women to minimize attention to their racial power and amplify attention to their sexual vulnerability. And to construct this view of patriarchy, they had to throw out decades of social scientific scholarship even though there was no empirical evidence that debunked that former scholarship.
As if this were not enough to question intersectionality, there are more problems with Crenshaw’s formulation of this now-popular theory. Like MacKinnon, Crenshaw argued that when power is based on biological sex, the sex in power—males—use sexual violence as a means of social control. To put it in no uncertain terms, men rape women as a means of perpetuating their control over women.
In her 1991 essay, Crenshaw states that “the use of rape to legitimize efforts to control and discipline the Black community is well established in historical literature on rape and race.” Though she claims this fact is well established, she cites only Joyce Williams and Karen Holmes’ 1981 work The Second Assault: Rape and Public Attitudes. As with MacKinnon’s theory of patriarchy, however, we can trace the history of Williams and Holmes’ work back to fundamentally racist origins.
In their 1967 book The Subculture of Violence, Martin Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti introduced the “subculture of violence” theory, which argues that subordinated groups, such as Black people in Amerika, had a distinct culture separate from mainstream white culture, and that this Black subculture was the cause of Black men and women’s supposed pathologically self-destructive behavior. Anyone familiar with right wing politics in the United States today should find this argument familiar, for the subculture of violence theory is the basis for all right-wing apologetics regarding police murders of Black people (“They are killing each other” etc.).
In 1971, Wolfgang’s student Menachem Amir expanded the subculture of violence theory in his book Patterns of Forcible Rape. According to Amir, Black men become rapists because “Negro culture” was pathological and the Black family structure was improper. Because Black fathers were absent, because Black mothers were unfit parents, and because Black culture prioritized sensual pleasures over civilized ones, Amir claimed that Black men developed a psychological need to overcompensate for their feminized self-image. Thus, they became rapists. If this also sounds like a contemporary right wing racist view, it’s because it is.
“White feminists adopted Amir’s view of Black masculinity throughout their texts,” Curry explains. In Against Our Will (1975), Susan Brownmiller insisted that “The single most important contribution of Amir’s Philadelphia study was to place the rapist squarely within the subculture of violence.” This book is considered a classic and still-relevant feminist text today.
Interestingly, Amir rejected the 19th and early 20th century view that Black men primarily raped white women. Yet he replaced that view with a new theory which claimed that Black men primarily raped Black women. This transition from view Black men as inter-racial rapists to viewing them as intra-racial rapists is a key development in this racist history. Yet one more transformation in this feminist ideology was necessary.
In the mid-1970s, Lynn Curtis published several works, including the book Violence, Rape, and Culture, transforming the subculture of violence theory into a theory of Black male pathology. Unlike Amir, who argued that Black male rapists were the product of the savagery of Black culture, Curtis argued that Black male’s became rapists because in their quest for masculinity, the emulated white male patriarchy and the sexual violence such patriarchy relies upon. Unlike Amir’s theory, in which Black women play a role in transmitting the supposedly deficient values of Black culture, Curtis’ theory positions Black women as neutral or innocent bystanders to the brutality of pathological Black males trying desperately to join the patriarchy they have been excluded from. On this view, white male patriarchy is more sophisticated and Black male attempts at patriarchy are more savage—but they are fundamentally the same.
When Williams and Holmes wrote The Second Assault, they cited the work of Curtis and developed it further. In their own articulation, Williams and Holmes states that Black men became rapists not because Black culture is savage but because Black men imitate the patterns of white male patriarchy. The supposed sameness of Black males and white males (a male body) was thought to be the grounds for such imitative behavior, and the supposed sameness of Black women and white women (a female body) was thought to be the grounds for their respective vulnerability to sexual violence. Interestingly, The Second Assault was poorly received by scholars, with one reviewer noting that the quantitative data presented in the book did not support—nay, contradicted!—the conclusions presented.
Thus, when Crenshaw cites Williams and Holmes to claim that “the use of rape to legitimize efforts to control and discipline the Black community is well established in historical literature on rape and race,” she is relying on a book that not only emerges directly out of white supremacist theories of Black life (perpetuating the myth the Black male rapist in a new form) but a book that presents conclusions in contradiction with its evidence.
Again, Crenshaw’s “gender” analysis is not revolutionary, nor progressive—it is barley liberal. It is based in racist scholarship that was motivated by the political needs of elite white women rather than historical and sociological evidence. And it is only a few degrees away from the racist bile spewed by contemporary anti-Black right-wing pundits.
The racist, colonialist mentality embedded in Crenshaw’s intersectionality should not surprise us. Remember what she said in 1988: People can demand change only in ways that reflect the logic of the institutions they are challenging. Because intersectionality was created to make change within racist and colonialist institutions, it is only fitting that intersectionality reflect that racist and colonialist logic. This is where idealist versions of CRT take us.
Intersectionality is not going away. Since their publication, Chrenshaw’s 1989 and 1991 articles have approximately 21,000 citations and 27,000 citations respectively. Now that intersectionality has been hitched to the current CRT wave of popularity, and given that Crenshaw is widely considered the foremost authority on CRT, we should expect calls for this theory of intersectionality to spread even more.
To be sure, almost no present-day proponent of intersectionality knows anything about the history of the term or the roots of the theory. Almost none of these self-described advocates of intersectionality knows how to perform an “intersectional analysis.” For most, the word “intersectionality” is—like “critical race theory” itself—an empty slogan used to signal that they have the right moral orientation; many people say “intersectionality” to prove they oppose racism, sexism, and so on. But when Black feminists of the 1990s are caught repackaging white supremacist ideas from the 1890s, we should probably reconsider not only the slogans we think are progressive but also the scholars we think are authorities on radical change.
This series on CRT is dedicated to Glen Ford, who was a deeply inspirational revolutionary thinker and who will always have my utmost admiration and appreciation. Thank you, Glen.
Monthly Review does not necessarily adhere to all of the views conveyed in articles republished at MR Online. Our goal is to share a variety of left perspectives that we think our readers will find interesting or useful. —Eds.
About Patrick AndersonPatrick D. Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Central State University. His research focuses on the Anticolonial Tradition of Black Radical Thought and the connections between technology, ethics, and imperialism. In addition to contributing to Mint Press News and Black Agenda Report, Patrick is editor at the WikiLeaks Bibliography . He can be reached at panderson@centralstate.edu
Critical Race Theory (CRT)Kimberlé Crenshawpart 3
How the U.S. came to dominate Haiti: seizing the gold
10 brilliant new albums to unfuck the world
Also by Patrick Anderson
The theory of intersectionality emerges out of racist, colonialist ideology, not radical politics—Rethinking the CRT Debate Part 3 by Patrick Anderson September 13, 2021
The conspicuous absence of Derrick Bell—rethinking the CRT debate, Part 1 by Patrick Anderson September 10, 2021
No comments:
Post a Comment