of CRT, they are not limited to one nation state but instead spread transnationally. While CRT is often construed as being a US-centric paradigm of thought, this book therefore shows how – by virtue of being a social theory grounded in empirical research – CRT offers a flexible approach to the study of racial inequality across space and time.
There is a difference between conceptual flexibility and theoretical universalism. As highlighted by postcolonial and decolonial approaches, universalism is characterized by an assumption that despite a theory ‘being the product of such a specific milieu […] the thoughts produced […] simply apply universally’ (Connell 2018: 401). Claims to universalism are thus layered in relations of epistemic domination, constituted by a chauvinism where the ‘Theory’ is the ‘Theory of everything’, and everything must be comprehended through the lens of this Theory.
It is not the aim of this book to present a picture of CRT as a conceptual framework that can study all dimensions of racialization and racism across all of time and space. Such a universalism, in fact, would be in tension with CRT’s mission to battle epistemic inequality and to theorize creatively in and through empirical research. Rather, it is my aim to show how CRT – particularly through the racialized social system approach – despite emerging from a very specific discipline of legal studies, at a very specific time in the US post-civil rights era, does in fact offer a flexible conceptual framework that is useful for the study of racialization and racism across the world. Of course, before proceeding into a fuller discussion of such conceptual flexibility, it is useful to first clarify these roots and routes of CRT.
The roots and routes of critical race theory
The reactionary criticisms of CRT – especially in the US – tend to paint a picture of CRT as being endemic across the arts, humanities and social sciences since the 1980s. The reality of the situation is that CRT actually has a narrower intellectual lineage.
Of course, it is undeniable that in the second half of the twentieth century, critical work on race and racism was growing in the US academy. Ironically, due to the widely held post-civil rights ideology, which assumed that racism was now a thing of the past, this critical scholarship was largely about bringing legitimacy to frames that centred racism as a primary axis of social organization. Thus, to name just a handful of paradigms, in the 1970s we had Joyce Ladner’s (1973) call to move beyond a ‘white sociology’ which ignored continuing racial inequality, and Robert Staples’ (1976) subsequent call for a Black sociology, which took Black knowledges and methods seriously as a rebuttal of the dominant post-civil rights ideology. In the 1980s, we had Angela Davis (1983) and Manning Marable’s (1983) re-engagement with racial capitalism theory, Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s (1986) racial formation theory, showing how the post-civil rights era constituted a racial project which was still based on racial hierarchization, and Patricia Hill Collins’ (1986) Black feminist sociology stressing the importance of those epistemological frames which get pushed to the peripheries of the academy for their centring of race and gender.
As scholars such as Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg (2002) have pointed out, when a group of US legal scholars in the 1980s started referring to their work as ‘critical race theory’, there was already a large amount of critical scholarship on race and racism that was circulating in the US academy. Similarly to this wide body of scholarship, the self-declared critical race theorists wanted to displace ideologies which downplayed the continuing significance of racism. It is with these critical legal scholars that I propose we begin our overview of CRT as a strain of social scientific thought, though we must keep in mind that they were not working in an epistemological prism, but rather were part of a wider movement of recentring critical perspectives on race and racism.
A ‘legal’ definition of CRT?
As a social scientific approach in law, CRT emerged at a specific historical moment in the US in the 1980s, with the aim of exposing the false rhetoric of the civil rights movement. At the material level, CRT scholars pointed out that twenty years after the introduction of civil rights legislation, Black people were actually worse off on many socio-economic measures; as Kimberlé Crenshaw (1988: 1333) summarized:
The African-American socioeconomic position in American society has actually declined in the last two decades. Average annual family income for African-Americans dropped 9% from the 1970’s to the 1980’s […] Since 1969, the proportion of Black men between 25 and 55 earning less than $5000 a year rose from 8% to 20 […] African-American enrollment in universities and colleges is also on the decline.
Such material statistics highlighted that despite the supposed legal guarantees of equality, the material justice which was called for during the civil rights movement was yet to be realized. Indeed, this material reality was connected to the additional retrenchment of the civil rights rhetoric at a discursive level. Crenshaw (1988) analyses this retrenchment through focusing on the rise of ‘new right’ neoliberalism and neoconservatism, which accelerated under Reagan’s administration in the 1980s. This neoconservative culture was constellated around the belief that ‘the goal of the civil rights movement – the extension of formal equality to all Americans regardless of color – has already been achieved’ (Crenshaw 1988: 1334). This new right vision – typified by thinkers such as Thomas Sowell – was held together by a contradictory view that the very existence of civil rights legislation was evidence that the US provided equal opportunities to everyone, and therefore that there was in fact no need for the continuing presence of such equal opportunities legislation. By a similar circular logic, such new right intellectuals and politicians argued that civil rights activists were demanding equal outcomes, rather than equal opportunities – and the duty of the state was only to offer the latter. Indeed, this neoconservatism was steeped in cultural racism in the way it argued that because Black Americans had equal opportunities but not equal outcomes, these unequal outcomes were the fault of Black people themselves for not taking advantage of their equal opportunities.
Of course, there are many critiques of this period of neoconservatism, especially from theorists of racial capitalism such as Angela Davis (1983). What sectioned off CRT as its own paradigm, however, was its empirical focus on how the US legal system was continuing to reproduce racial inequality in the supposed era of ‘civil rights’. It was in this context that CRT was deliberately focusing on how the US legal system was itself a racializing force – that is, how the US legal framework made race and sustained racial domination. As the advocates of this position put it themselves:3
We began to think of our project as uncovering how law was a constitutive element of race itself: in other words, how law constructed race […] Laws produced racial power not simply through narrowing the scope of, say, anti-discrimination remedies, nor through racially biased decision-making, but instead, through myriad legal rules […] that continued to reproduce the structures and practices of racial domination.
This is not to say that CRT scholars thought that the use of the legal system to sustain racial domination was by any means a ‘new’ development in racial politics. In contrast, such legal scholars were aware that this was primarily an issue of continuity, whereby the US legal system, since its birth, has been founded on the rationalization of white domination over racialized others. This is well spelled out in Cheryl Harris’ (1993) ‘Whiteness as property’, where she shows how the US legal system constituted a network of racializing and racist forces: from the US Constitution defining the enslaved as ‘three-fifths of all other persons’, the one-drop laws dictating that the children of enslaved Black women – even when the father was white – were themselves Black and therefore owned by the slaver, the legal use of the enslaved ‘as a stand-in for actual currency’ (Harris 1993: 1720) in legal disputes, and the Homestead Acts which reallocated indigenous land to white Americans and failed to recognize indigenous property ownership, it is clear that the US legal system has been used to define and maintain the racial status quo.
Rather
