Thread by @ThabitiAnyabwil

Earlier tonight, @AlsoACarpenter tweeted a link to the article below on CRT. It's a long article reflecting on several contributions in an issue of that journal. It's a good peek into the intramural discussions of people in the field. In the middle, Carbado lists CRT commitments.

https://twitter.com/AlsoACarpenter/status/1326933718880022530

@AlsoACarpenter If you have the time, you should peruse the article. But for those not inclined or who feel lost in a lot of the technical jargon, etc., here's a series of tweets quoting the topic sentences in the section where Carbado lists core commitments of CRT:

@AlsoACarpenter 1/ “One might start by saying that CRT rejects the standard racial progress narrative that characterizes mainstream civil rights discourse namely, that the history of race relations in the United States is a history of linear uplift and improvement.”

@AlsoACarpenter 2/ “The problem with the racial progress narrative, however, is that it elides what I would call the "reform/retrenchment dialectic" that has constituted America's legal and political history.”

Exs:
Emancipation --> Jim Crow
Brown --> Brown II’s “all deliberate speed”

@AlsoACarpenter 3a/ “Nor do racial progress narratives make clear that the episodes we celebrate today as significant moments of racial reform (e.g., Brown) were moments of national crisis, moments that contested... the "tyranny of the majority"...moments preceded by mass political mobilization”

@AlsoACarpenter 3b/ “Far from reflecting national harmony in which the country as a whole agreed that racial change was in order, racial reform typically has occurred when the equality interest of people of color converges with the interest of powerful elites...

@AlsoACarpenter 3c/ "...and "even when the interest convergence results in an effective racial remedy, that remedy will be abrogated at the point that policy makers fear that the remedial policy is threatening" to the dominant social order.”

What Derrick Bell called "interest convergence."

@AlsoACarpenter 4/ “CRT repudiates the view that status quo arrangements are the natural result of individual agency and merit. We all inherit advantages and disadvantages, including the historically accumulated social effects of race.”

@AlsoACarpenter 5/ “This racial accumulation-which is economic (shaping both our income and wealth), cultural (shaping the social capital upon which we can draw), and ideological (shaping our perceived racial worth)-structure our life chances.”

@AlsoACarpenter 5b/ “CRT exposes these inter-generational transfers of racial compensation... by challenging two dominant principles upon which American anti-discrimination law and politics rest...

@AlsoACarpenter 5c/ "...to wit, that colorblindness necessarily produces race neutrality and that color consciousness necessarily produces racial preferences.”

@AlsoACarpenter 5d/ “The theory effectuates this reversal by demonstrating how colorblindness can produce racial preferences and how color consciousness can neutralize and disrupt embedded racial advantage."

@AlsoACarpenter 6a/ “CRT also weighs-in directly on the very idea of race, rejecting the conception of race as a biological fixed social category and arguing instead that race is socially constructed.”

@AlsoACarpenter 6b/ "CRT rejects the view that race precedes law, ideology, and social relations. Instead, Critical Race Theorists conceptualize race as a product of law, ideology, and social relations."

@AlsoACarpenter 6c/ “According to CRT, the law does not simply reflect ideas about race. The law constructs race: Law has historically employed race as a basis for group differentiation, entrenching the idea that there are "in fact" different races….”

@AlsoACarpenter 6d/ “CRT has also focused more specifically on how the law constructs whiteness, thus, for example, Cheryl Harris's arguments about "whiteness as property" and Ian Haney Lopez's white-by-law analysis of the naturalization cases.”

@AlsoACarpenter 7/ “Informing CRT's structural account of racism is the notion that racism is endemic in society. This locked-in feature of racism is linked to our very system of democracy. Which is to say, historically, racism has been constitutive of, rather than oppositional to, Am democracy"

@AlsoACarpenter 8/ “In describing racism as an endemic social force, CRT scholars argue that it interacts with other social forces, such as patriarchy, homophobia, and classism. The theory is thus committed to what Crenshaw has called 'intersectionality'.”

@AlsoACarpenter 9/ “Critical Race Theorists pursue this project across racial groups, and in the context of doing so try to avoid... the pitfalls of essentialism. While some would say CRT scholars are anti-essentialist, it would be more accurate to say that we aspire to be anti-essentialist.”

@AlsoACarpenter 10/ “Clearly, the foregoing ideas do not fully capture CRT. Nor is my summary articulation of them a particularly good window on the transformative work CRT can perform.”

@AlsoACarpenter Well... for what it's worth, that's a summary offered by one theorist in the field. If you have questions, please check out the article. you can zoom in on that section for context, illustration, and intramural rebuttals. If engaging this topic, best to use their viewpoints.