.. iNTRODUCTION H I s volume offers a representative, desire not merely to understand the vexed bond T though by no means exhaustive, compila­ between law and racial power but to change it. tion of the growing body of legal scholarship The essays gathered here thus share an ethical known as Critical Race Theory (CRT). As we commitment to human liberation-even if we conceive it, Critical Race Theory embraces a reject conventional notions of what such a con­ movement of left scholars, most of them schol­ ception means, and though we often disagree, ars of color, situated in law schools, whose work even among ourselves, over its specific direction. challenges the ways in which race and racial This ethical aspiration finds its most obvious power are constructed and represented in concrete expression in the pursuit of engaged, American legal culture and, more generally, in even adversarial, scholarship. The writings in American society as a whole. In assembling and this collaboration may be read as contributions editing these essays, we have tried both to to what Edward Said has called "antithetical provide a sense of the intellectual genesis of this knowledge," the development of counter­ project and to map the main methodological accounts of social reality by subversive and sub­ directions that Critical Race Theory has taken altern elements of the reigning order. Critical since its inception. Toward these ends, the Race Theory-like the Critical Legal Studies essays in the first few parts are arranged roughly movement with which we are often allied-re­ in the chronological order of their publication. jects the prevailing orthodoxy that scholarship The remaining parts, however, are devoted to should be or could be "neutral" and "objective." the most important methodological strands of We believe that legal scholarship about race in Critical Race Theory today. We have chosen to America can never be written from a distance of present the substance of the original essays detachment or with an attitude ofobjectivity. To rather than small portions of a greater number the extent that racial power is exercised legally of works, in the interest of providing the reader and ideologically, legal scholarship about race is with texts that retain as much of their complex­ an important site for the construction of that ity, context, and nuance as possible. power, and thus is always a factor, if"only" ideo­ As these writings demonstrate, there is no logically, in the economy of racial power itself. canonical set of doctrines or methodologies to To use a phrase from the existentialist tradition, which we all subscribe. Although Critical Race there is "no exit"-no scholarly perch outside the scholarship differs in object, argument, accent, social dynamics of racial power from which and emphasis, it is nevertheless unified by two merely to observe and analyze. Scholarship-the common interests. The first is to understand formal production, identification, and organiza­ how a regime of white supremacy and its subor­ tion ofwhat will be called "knowledge"-is inev­ dination of people of color have been created itably political. Each of the texts in this volume and maintained in America, and, in particular, seeks in its own way not simply to explicate but to examine the relationship between that social also to intervene in the ideological contestation structure and professed ideals such as "the rule of race in America, and to create new, opposi­ of law" and "equal protection." The second is a tionist accounts of race. [xiv] The aspect of our work which most markedly rested on the exclusion of virtually the entire distinguishes it from conventional liberal and domain of progressive thinking about race conservative legal scholarship about race and within colored communities. With its explicit inequality is a deep dissatisfaction with tradi­ embrace of race-consciousness, Critical Race tional civil rights discourse. As several of the Theory aims to reexamine the terms by which authors in this collection demonstrate, the race and racism have been negotiated in Ameri­ reigning contemporary American ideologies can consciousness, and to recover and revitalize about race were built in the sixties and seventies the radical tradition of race-consciousness around an implicit social compact. This com­ among Mrican-Americans and other peoples pact held that racial power and racial justice of color-a tradition that was discarded when would be understood in very particular ways. integration, assimilation and the ideal of color­ Racial justice was embraced in the American blindness became the official norms of racial mainstream in terms that excluded radical or enlightenment. fundamental challenges to status quo institu­ The image of a "traditional civil rights dis­ tional practices in American society by treating course" refers to the constellation of ideas about the exercise of racial power as rare and aberra­ racial power and social transformation that were tional rather than as systemic and ingrained. constructed partly by, and partly as a defense The construction of "racism" from what Alan against, the mass mobilization of social energy Freeman terms the "perpetrator perspective" re­ and popular imagination in the civil rights strictively conceived racism as an intentional, movements of the late fifties and sixties. To albeit irrational, deviation by a conscious those who participated in the civil rights move­ wrongdoer from otherwise neutral, rational, and ments firsthand-say, as part of the street and just ways of distributing jobs, power, prestige, body politics engaged in by Reverend Martin and wealth. The adoption of this perspective Luther King, Jr.'s cadres in town after town allowed a broad cultural mainstream both ex­ across the South-the fact that they were part plicitly to acknowledge the fact of racism and, of a deeply subversive movement of mass resis­ simultaneously, to insist on its irregular occur­ tance and social transformation was obvious. rence and limited signi1icance. As Freeman con­ Our opposition to traditional civil rights dis­ cludes, liberal race reform thus served to legiti­ course is neither a criticism of the civil rights mize the basic myths of American meritocracy. movement nor an attempt to diminish its sig­ In Gary Peller's depiction, this mainstream ni1icance. On the contrary, as Anthony Cook's civil rights discourse on "race relations" was radical reading of King's theology and social constructed in this way partly as a defense theory makes explicit, we draw much of our against the more radical ideologies of racial inspiration and sense of direction from that liberation presented by the Black Nationalist courageous, brilliantly conceived, spiritually in­ and Black Consciousness movements of the spired, and ultimately transformative mass ac­ sixties and early seventies, and their less visible tion. but intellectually subversive scholarly presenta­ Of course, colored people made important tions by people such as James Turner, now social gains through civil rights reform, as did a teacher in black studies at Cornell. In the American society generally: in fact, but for the construction of "racism" as the irrational and civil rights movements' victories against racial backward bias of believing that someone's race exclusion, this volume and the Critical Race is important, the American cultural mainstream Theory movement generally could not have neatly linked the black left to the white racist been taught at mainstream law schools. The right: according to this quickly coalesced con­ law's incorporation of what several authors here sensus, because race-consciousness character­ call "formal equality" (the prohibition against ized both white supremacists and black nation­ explicit racial exclusion, like "whites only" signs) alists, it followed that both were racists. The marks a decidedly progressive moment in U.S. resulting "center" of cultural common sense thus political and social history. However, the fact •• [xv] that civil rights advocates met with some success identify such race-consciousness as racism itself. in the nation's courts and legislatures ought not Indeed, the problem here was not simply politi­ obscure the central role the American legal cal and strategic: the predominant legal repre­ order played in the deradicalization of racial sentation of racism as the mere recognition of liberation movements. Along with the suppr~ s­ race matched the "personal" views of many sion of explicit white racism (the widely cele­ liberals themselves, creating for them a contra­ brated aim of civil rights reform), the dominant diction in their hearts as well as their words. legal conception of racism as a discrete and Liberal antidiscrimination proponents pro­ identifiable act of "prejudice based on skin posed various ways to reconcile this contradic­ color" placed virtually the entire range of every­ tion: they characterized affirmative action as a day social practices in America-social practices merely "exceptional" remedy for past injustice, developed and maintained throughout the pe­ a temporary tool to be used only until equal riod of formal American apartheid-beyond the opportunity is achieved or a default mechanism scope of critical examination or legal remedia­ for reaching discrimination that could not be tion. proved directly. Separate but related liberal The affirmative action debate, which is dis­ defenses of affirmative action hold that its ben­ cussed in several essays in this volume, provides eficiaries have suffered from "deprived" a vivid example of what we mean. From its backgrounds that require limited special consid­ inception, mainstream legal thinking in the eration in the otherwise fully rational and unbi­ U.S. has been characterized by a curiously con­ ased competition for social goods, or that af­ stricted understanding of race and power. firmative action promotes social "diversity," a Within this cramped conception of racial domi­ value which in the liberal vision is independent nation, the evil of racism exists when-and only of, perhaps even at odds with, equality of oppor­ when-one can point to specific, discrete acts of tunity or meritocracy.