Thread by @AlsoACarpenter

Broadly speaking, two visions of civil rights law emerged out of the Civil Rights Movement (CRM). The tension between them explains much of where we are now.

A thread:

2/ On the one hand, White progressives, along with the developing Black middle-class, centered their continued civil rights vision on the analytics of prejudice, discrimination, and segregation.

3/ That is, the social problem of racism was understood to be personal prejudice and bias due to irrationally allowing physical and ancestral difference to justify partiality; discrimination was thought to be the specific, individuable, and intentional actions resulting from

4/ personal prejudice—in particular, allowing race to figure into decision-making; and, last, segregation was thought to be the social, legal, and political manifestation of prejudice and discrimination.

5/ As such, the remedy for racism, so construed, was to overcome prejudice with knowledge and enlightenment, to overcome discrimination through color-blindness—not allowing race to “count for anything,” and, finally, integration.

6/ CRT scholar Gary Peller has dubbed this analysis, “liberal integrationism,” and it quickly became the dominant analysis of American “race relations” by the beginning of the 1970s.

7/ On the other hand, a much older tradition contained in various Black nationalisms, going back to at least the latter part of the 18th century, were also central to the CRM—as exemplified by figures as distinct as Huey P. Newton and Martin Luther King, Jr.

8/ Rather than prejudice, discrimination, and segregation, this analysis was centered on power, subordination, and the metaphor of colonialism. That is, the problem of racism in American society was understood to be the extreme power differential between the White and Black

9/ communities; the social and legal subordination of people-groups was understood to be the primary evil of racism, not so much individual prejudice or bias; and the central subordination metaphor for how the White community has historically related to the Black community was

10/ that of colonizer to colonized, not so much physical separation.

The remedy, accordingly, was understood to be redistribution of social, legal, and political power, liberation of subordinate communities from the domination of the White community, and a reparations model of

11/ justice intended to democratically redistribute power and resources from colonizer to colonized, as opposed to the liberal integrationist vision of absorption of Black institutions and norms into White institutions and norms.

12/ The success of the liberal integrationist model, of course, has all but outlawed Black nationalist analysis in public discourse, treating such claims as themselves “racist” on White integrationist terms. Once the ideology of liberal integrationism had been widely adopted,

13/ both Black nationalists and White supremacists could together be rejected as backward, prejudiced, unenlightened, anti-liberal enemies of racial progress in America—and, more realistically, enemies of the presumed “race-neutral” status quo.

14/ Rather than racial subordination or unequal distribution of power and resources, “color-consciousness” itself became the hallmark of racist violation, whether “perpetrated” by White or Black Americans. Simply put, contrary to the traditional Black nationalist analysis, to be

15/ “not racist” in post-CRM America is to not “see race,” to not allow race to “count for anything.” And the legal correlate of this integrationist ethic has been to understand “equal protection under the law” to mean “equal treatment for all,”

16/16 regardless of racially subordinated historical circumstances.

This is why CRT develped.