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The Racialized Social System
Critical Race Theory as Social Theory
Ali Meghji
polity
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Copyright © Ali Meghji 2022
The right of Ali Meghji to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
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Preface
Just over a century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois published Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. This book is packed with history, theology, autoethnography, hymns and poetry. One of his central messages is that the world can be otherwise. We live in a time and geopolitical climate marked by anti-intellectualism and campaigns against critical thinking; nothing seems more clear than that we need the world to be otherwise, and thus I wish to begin this book with Du Bois’ comment:
From my narrowed windows I stare into the night that looms beneath the cloud-swept stars. Eastward and westward storms are breaking, – great, ugly whirlwinds of hatred and blood and cruelty. I will not believe them inevitable. I will not believe that all that was must be, that all the shameful drama of the past must be done again today before the sunlight sweeps the silver sea.
If I cry amid this roar of elemental forces, must my cry be in vain, because it is but a cry, – a small and human cry amid Promethean gloom?
Introduction: Critical Race Theory as Social Theory
In September 2020, President Donald Trump described critical race theory (CRT) as being ‘like a cancer’, labelling CRT as an anti-American ideology ‘deployed to rip apart friends, neighbours, and families’. This presidential furore resulted in an executive order which banned the teaching of CRT in employee training schemes run by the federal agency or any company with a government contract. Across the Atlantic, those in Britain were happy to echo Trump’s disparaging of CRT. The state’s Minister for Equalities, Kemi Badenoch, claimed that the government ‘stood unequivocally against critical race theory’, while reactionary actor-turned-politician Laurence Fox wrote: ‘Let’s call Critical Race theory by its real name. Modern Racism. It’s organised and it’s scary’,1 and journalist Guy Birchall exclaimed that ‘The type of people that whine about endemic white supremacy, critical race theory and “decolonising” things fundamentally dislike Britain and Western culture.’ Commentators in Australia likewise were criticizing CRT as being part of a grievance culture whereby ‘Any individual who fights against the Theory is deemed by the Theory to be racist anyway and will be condemned as racist by activists or the diversity police.’2
However, despite having a shared hostility towards CRT, such commentators often had quite disparate accounts of what CRT actually is. While Trump lumped together CRT with ‘Marxist ideology’ and the supposed militarism of Black Lives Matter, in Britain CRT was seen as being an offshoot of the ‘decolonizing’ movement which sought to recognize the darker side of Britain’s history, and in Australia CRT was seen as being part of a wider ‘wokeist’ social justice movement. Indeed, academics likewise have differed quite radically in their understandings of what CRT is. While several Marxist critics have seen CRT as being an assertion of race-centrism steeped in identity politics (for instance Cole 2009a, 2009b), other scholars more sympathetic to the CRT project have still described it as ‘not a unified theory but a loose hodgepodge of analytic tools that are frequently used in a catch-as-catch-can manner’ (Treviño et al. 2008: 9). Indeed, CRT is not even mentioned in Emirbayer and Desmond’s (2015: 1) recent survey of theories of race/ism, despite their assertion that ‘there never has been a comprehensive and systematic theory of race’.
In a sense, these brief anecdotes quite neatly summarize both why I write this book, and how I will approach the book’s content. On the one hand, this book is written very much as an attempt to define the conceptual contours of CRT through what has been termed the racialized social system approach. Through showing how the racialized social system approach is a social theory, this book therefore highlights how CRT offers a flexible framework used to study contemporary societal arrangements in a way that is grounded in empirical research. Central to the racialized social system approach is the attempt to show how racial inequality is embodied in the structure of society and reproduced through the micro, meso and macro levels. Of course, it is through exposing this structural presence of racism that CRT has managed to attract such a large following of reactionary disparagement. In this regard, I also write this book to show how the public and political responses to CRT often demonstrate the very same points that CRT seeks to make
