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Twenty Years of Critical Race Theory: Looking Back to Move Forward CONNECTICUT LAW REVIEW VOLUME 43 JULY 2011 NUMBER 5 Article Twenty Years of Critical Race Theory: Looking Back To Move Forward KIMBERLÉ WILLIAMS CRENSHAW This Article revisits the history of Critical Race Theory (CRT) through a prism that highlights its historical articulation in light of the emergence of post- racialism. The Article will explore two central inquiries. This first query attends to the specific contours of law as the site out of which CRT emerged. The Article hypothesizes that legal discourse presented a particularly legible template from which to demystify the role of reason and the rule of law in upholding the racial order. The second objective is to explore the contemporary significance of CRT’s trajectory in light of today’s “post-racial” milieu. The Article posits that CRT emerged between the pillars of liberal racial reform and Critical Legal Studies and that other conditions of its possibility included the temporal, institutional, and ideological nature of race discourse in the mid-eighties. Turning to the contemporary period, the Article posits that the post-racial turn presents conditions that are both parallel to and distinct from those that prevailed during CRTs formative years, and that the challenge of a contemporary CRT is to synthesize a transdisciplinary critique and counter-narrative to the post-racial settlement. 1253 ARTICLE CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................. 1255 II. MOVEMENT ORIGINS AND POLITICAL FORMATION .............. 1262 A. THE CLEARING ................................................................................. 1262 B. THE ALTERNATIVE COURSE .............................................................. 1277 C. EMERGING RACE DISCOURSE AMONG THE “CRITS” ......................... 1287 D. THE “SOUNDS OF SILENCE” .............................................................. 1295 E. CREATING THE CRT WORKSHOP....................................................... 1298 III. WHY LAW? ASSESSING CRT’S CONDITIONS OF POSSIBILITY ..................................................... 1300 A. INSTITUTIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE .................................................... 1301 B. TEMPORAL OPPORTUNITY ................................................................. 1305 C. THE POLITICS OF LAW....................................................................... 1307 IV. CRITICAL RACE THEORY IN A “POST-RACIAL” STATE .......... 1310 A. COLORBLINDNESS’S BILLION DOLLAR MAKE-OVER: OLD IDEAS IN NEW SKINS ............................................................. 1315 B. POST-RACIAL SANCTION ................................................................... 1327 C. FROM COLORBLIND MERITOCRACY TO POST-RACIAL PRAGMATISM: THE NEW COOL POSE ............................................ 1330 D. THE NEW MISALIGNMENTS: RACIAL JUSTICE ADVOCACY AND POST-RACIAL ENTRAPMENT .............................. 1336 V. REVISIONING CRITICAL RACE THEORY OUTSIDE THE BOUNDS OF POST-RACIAL ENTRAPMENT: ASSESSING THE CONDITIONS OF POSSIBILITY ....................... 1346 Twenty Years of Critical Race Theory: Looking Back To Move Forward KIMBERLÉ WILLIAMS CRENSHAW* I. INTRODUCTION This Article revisits the history of Critical Race Theory (CRT) through a prism that highlights the relevance of its institutional articulation in light of contemporary discourses on race and racism.1 As with most narratives of origins, this one is animated more by contemporary challenges than by the simple rituals of telling and receiving stories from the past.2 The * Professor of Law, Columbia University Law School and University of California at Los Angeles School of Law. Co-Founder, African American Policy Forum. I have benefitted greatly from numerous comments and observations from colleagues both past and present, including George Bisharat, Paul Butler, Devon Carbado, Sumi Cho, Neil Gotanda, George Lipsitz, Cynthia Muldrow, Alvin Starks, Barbara Tomlinson, and the participants of the AAPF Social Justice Writers Retreat. Mack Eason, Michelle Pram, and Victoria Kwan provided able research assistance and Jennifer Lentz, Amy Atchison, Vicki Steiner, and John Wilson provided invaluable support in uncovering archival documentation. Very special thanks to Gary Peller and Luke Charles Harris who willingly relived the 1980s through countless conversations and recollections, and to Angela Onwuachi-Willig who organized the 20th Anniversary celebration of the Critical Race Theory Workshop hosted by the University of Iowa Law School where an earlier version of this Article was presented as a keynote presentation. 1 Throughout this Article I refer to Americans of African descent using the terms “Black” and “African American” interchangeably. I capitalize “Black” because “Blacks, like Asians, Latinos, and other ‘minorities,’ constitute a specific cultural group and, as such, require denotation as a proper noun.” Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law, 101 HARV. L. REV. 1331, 1332 n.2 (1988) (citing Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory, 7 SIGNS 515, 516 (1982)). This issue of naming Americans of African descent has long had political overtones. See W.E.B. DUBOIS, 2 THE SEVENTH SON 12–13 (1971) (arguing that the “N” in Negro was always capitalized until, in defense of slavery, the use of the lower case “n” became the custom in “recognition” of Blacks’ status as property; that the usage was defended as a “description of the color of a people;” and that the capitalization of other ethnic and national origin designations made the failure to capitalize “Negro” an insult). Some who grapple with this issue take the position that white must also be capitalized if Black is, however, this seems to presume a greater parallelism between these racial designations than their histories suggest. Of the myriad differences is the fact that while white can be further divided into a variety of ethnic and national identities, Black represents an effort to claim a cultural identity that has historically been denied. Of course the increasing recognition of interethnic differentiation among Americans of African descent may at some point overtake this claim, and whiteness is sometimes regarded as a singular cultural group rather than an amalgam of historic ethnicities, but the case for arriving at some sort of symmetry in what the two designations mark seems unlikely for the foreseeable future. 2 I have reviewed related elements of this narrative elsewhere. See Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, The First Decade: Critical Reflections, or “A Foot in the Closing Door,” 49 UCLA L. REV. 1343, 1364 (2002) [hereinafter Crenshaw, Critical Reflections]; see also Introduction to CRITICAL RACE THEORY: THE KEY WRITINGS THAT FORMED THE MOVEMENT, at xii (Kimberlé Crenshaw et al. eds., 1995) [hereinafter CRITICAL RACE THEORY: THE KEY WRITINGS] (reviewing the emergence of CRT as a mutual engagement with liberal legal theory and CLS); Sumi Cho & Robert Westley, Critical Race 1256 CONNECTICUT LAW REVIEW [Vol. 43:1253 spectrum of issues that will be engaged herein are framed through two central inquiries. This first question attends to the specific contours of law as the site out of which CRT emerged. The second objective is to explore the contemporary significance of CRT’s trajectory in light of today’s “post-racial” milieu. The first question of “why law” is seldom asked, notwithstanding the contemporary trajectory of CRT’s travels across disciplines. Today, CRT can claim a presence in education,3 psychology,4 cultural studies,5 political science,6 and even philosophy.7 The way that CRT is received and Coalitions: Key Movements that Performed the Theory, 33 U.C. DAVIS L. REV. 1377, 1377, 1381 (2000) (drawing attention to the broader context of student struggles over integration at Berkeley and other law schools in subsequent years). While these narratives foreground the antiracist activist tradition out of which early CRT emerged, Richard Delgado has traced the origins of CRT to the institutional purging of the white left and their subsequent influence on the first generation of CRT academics. Richard Delgado, Liberal McCarthyism and the Origins of Critical Race Theory, 94 IOWA L. REV. 1505, 1508 (2009). For additional narratives, see Athena D. Mutua, The Rise, Development and Future Directions of Critical Race Theory and Related Scholarship, 84 DENV. U. L. REV. 329 (2006); Stephanie L. Phillips, The Convergence of the Critical Race Theory Workshop with LatCrit Theory: A History, 53 U. MIAMI L. REV. 1247 (1999). 3 See Gloria Ladson-Billings & William F. Tate IV, Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education, in CRITICAL RACE THEORY IN EDUCATION: ALL GOD’S CHILDREN GOT A SONG 11, 18 (Adrienne D. Dixson & Celia K. Rousseau eds., 2006) (discussing the relationship between race and educational inequality). See generally FOUNDATIONS OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY IN EDUCATION (Edward Taylor et al. eds., 2009) (a collection of works applying Critical Race Theory as a tool to explore the racial and cultural politics of education); RACE IS . RACE ISN’T : CRITICAL RACE THEORY AND QUALITATIVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION (Laurence Parker, Donna Deyhle & Sofia Villenas eds., 1999) (collecting studies and commentaries that articulate an overview of Critical Race Theory in education). 4 See Glenn Adams & Phia S. Salter, A Critical Race Psychology Is Not Yet Born, 43 CONN. L. REV. 1355 (2011) (arguing that “Critical Race Psychology”
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