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Critical Race Theory: Its Origins, History, and Importance to the Discourses and Rhetorics of Race

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Critical Race Theory: Its Origins, History, and Importance to the Discourses and Rhetorics of Race FRAME NO. 27.2 NOVEMBER 2014 | 09 – 27 Critical Race Theory: Its Origins, History, and Importance to the Discourses and Rhetorics of Race AJA Y. MARTINEZ ABSTRACT Critical Race Theory (CRT) originated in which to better understand discourses US law schools, bringing together issues of race and racism in contemporary of power, race, and racism to address color blind and supposed post-racial the liberal notion of color blindness, societies. This work is situated within and argues that ignoring racial difference rhetorical studies so as to trace maintains and perpetuates the status connections between CRT scholarship quo with its deeply institutionalized and literatures in anti-racist rhetoric injustices to racial minorities. This essay that seek to understand, challenge, and introduces CRT as a theoretical frame by dismantle systems of racism. 10 AJA Y. MARTINEZ An American Context Saturday, August 9th, Ferguson, Missouri, US — a suburb of St. Louis — an eighteen-year-old teenager was shot, multiple times, until dead, by a local police officer. He was unarmed. He had his hands raised in the universal gesture for surrender. He pleaded with the officer “I don’t have a gun, please stop shooting.” Yet he was shot. Multiple times. Until dead. His name was Michael Brown. His offense? Jaywalking. His race? Black. The year? 2014. As swiftly as this young man’s life was extinguished, the US media were quick to piece together a story criminalizing this youth through sensationalized headlines and images that drew attention to Brown’s black skin and imposing male body (Dickerson; Garcia–Vargas). Words such as “man” versus “teen/child,” and an image of an unsmiling casually dressed Brown versus an alternatively available image of the teen in his high school graduation cap and gown, are but few examples of the rhetorical tools wielded by the US media to confirm Brown’s guilt by way of the “violent black male” stereotype. As details of the days’ events became available from contradictory police department statements and conflicting witness accounts, the American public made equally available its state of divisiveness in perception along the lines of race. Surely prompted by debates raging and ranging from major news shows to the comment sections following blog posts and articles of Brown’s death, the Pew Center for Research reported that 80% of African Americans (based on survey data) believe this case raises important issues about race, while 47% of white Americans believe the issue of race is getting more attention than it deserves (“Stark Racial Divisions” 1). As an American, but significantly, as an American of color who studies contemporary rhetorics of race and racism, I am not surprised by this divide. In fact, the above cited Pew study also confirms exactly how status quo these racialized American perceptions are, through findings that report 60% of white Americans similarly believe race received more attention than was necessary in the 2012 – 13 Trayvon Martin case, while 78% of black Americans reported the case raised important issues about race (“Stark Racial Divisions” 4).1 Equally status quo is the all too common and constant violence and death that unarmed CRITICAL RACE THEORY 11 people of color are subjected to at the hands of white police officers. According to Melissa Harris Perry, “From 2006 to 2012 a white police officer killed a black person at least twice a week in [the US],” but the national news media consistently pay little to no attention to these tragedies and as a result the American public is at best unaware of these deaths and at worst, apathetic (Mirkinson). And yet, as Stacey Patton asserts, the post-emancipation devaluing of black bodies is nothing short of an American tradition, but it is a tradition largely overlooked due to white supremacist bias in the media, and significantly, bias in the formation and tellings of US history.2 Americans are overwhelmingly subjected to hegemonic educations in which the histories of people of color in this country are minimized to footnotes within textbooks, and these passing acknowledgements generally subscribe to a multicultural studies model that steers well clear of social justice oriented and consciousness-raising history; history that confirms Patton’s (but also Angela Y. Davis’s, Cornel West’s, and Michelle Alexander’s, to name a few) assertion that violence, death, incarceration, and the stripping of humanity are tradition in this country. Instead of a history curriculum that acknowledges the humanity of — and confers dignity unto — people of color, this multicultural studies model preferences a curriculum that “celebrates” people of color through diversity of “culture” (food, language, traditional dress, etc.), and through this focus, students are very rarely exposed to aspects of American history that provide dimension and complexity to the narrative. Further, when social justice oriented educational programs are formed, such as Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican-American Studies program in Arizona, they are effectively challenged and banned by government based on legislative claims that programs such as these:3 1. See: http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/05/us/trayvon-martin-shooting-fast-facts/ for more information on the controversial 2012 shooting of black teen Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, who in 2013 was found not guilty of murder. 2. The period after US President Abraham Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation” of 1863, that set into effect the abolition of American slavery, and the freeing of millions of black slaves. 3. See: http://www.azcentral.com/news/politics/articles/20130311arizona-ethnic-studies-ban-ruling.html for the most up-to-date information regarding the ban of TUSD’s Ethnic Studies program. 12 AJA Y. MARTINEZ — Promote the overthrow of the United States Government. — Promote resentment toward a race or class of people. — Are courses designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group. — Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals. (State of Arizona 1 – 2) The assumptions asserted through these government restrictions on education paired together with the example of Michael Brown’s death at the hands of a white police officer, combined with the ensuing racialized division in perception of this tragedy, are but a few microcosmic examples of an overarching issue in the US; the issue of attitudes and belief that we as a nation and people are in an era of post-raciality and that color blindness is the preferable racial attitude to maintain. It is because of these racial attitudes that scholarship of critical race theorists has not lost or lessened in its relevance, and I venture to argue that this work, through its theories and methods, is as necessary now as it ever was if we as scholar-teachers are to challenge the white supremacist status quo in the educational institution. As a response to the contemporary state of race and racism, this essay will review major theories about race and will suggest Critical Race Theory and its methodology of counterstory as a tool by which scholar-teachers can intervene in and disrupt the color blind narrative of post-raciality. Why Critical Race Theory? “Does racism still exist?” This question expressed by a university student in the very first college-level course I ever taught is the impetus for my work in Critical Race Theory (CRT). In United States history courses, US students are taught about the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Many come away from this experience with the idea that “racism,” as a term, is defined as isolated blatant acts of violence or discrimination toward individuals of color. The key word in this equation is “individual,” for racism is still commonly imagined as only visible behavior from one individual toward another (Bonilla–Silva 8). Or as Michael Omi and Howard Winant assert, racism, and the CRITICAL RACE THEORY 13 “common sense” surrounding its definition, is “generally understood in a more limited fashion, as a matter of prejudiced attitudes or bigotry […] and discriminatory practices” (133). Racism, as imagined and expressed in the US, has a historic visibility that very much informs the visual historic landscape more generally associated with the era of Jim Crow (spanning 1876 – 1965) racism and racist policies and practices.4 This blatant meaning of racism forms the contemporary general understanding of what constitutes racism in the US, and students in our public institutions are taught in primary and secondary school that the Civil Rights Movement worked to eliminate racism as understood through these forms of derogatory and segregationist behavior (Olson 211). While the Civil Rights Movement dismantled racism de jure, the racisms of systemic and institutional prejudice, discrimination, and inequities remain and very much inform the lived realities for people of color in the US. In Racial Formations, Michael Omi and Howard Winant contend that contemporary race as a categorization of human bodies is an unstable and “‘decentered’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle” (123). Further, they assert the permanence of race as a category and describe the dimensions of race as maintained by racial projects that function to secure race as fundamental in the structuring and representing of the social world (124). Racial formation then is the theory that explains the “sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (124). In terms of racism, Omi and Winant (along with many more race theorists) point to the structural features of racism in US society as a product of “centuries of systemic exclusion, exploitation, and disregard of racially defined minorities” (133). The contemporary era of racism, termed “color blind racism” 4. “Jim Crow” refers to an era of US racism in which racial segregation laws between whites and blacks (but also, in some instances and regions, other racially minoritized groups such as Mexican–Americans, Native American, and Asian American) were enacted between 1876 and 1965.
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