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Race Consciousness RACE CONSCIOUSNESS GARY PELLER* The entire civil rights struggle needs a new interpretation, a broader interpretation. We need to look at this civil rights thing from another angle-from the inside as well as from the outside. To those of us whose philosophy is black nationalism, the only way you can get in- volved in the civil rights struggle is to give it a new interpretation. The old interpretation excluded us. It kept us out.' -Malcolm X, 1963 This Essay is, in part, a reaction to the emergence of critical race theory, the new scholarship about race being produced by people of color in American law schools. 2 As I see it, one of the historically significant features of the critical race theory movement is that, after nearly two decades of relative consensus about what a progressive race reform agenda encompasses, a new generation of scholars is in a sense following Malcolm X's advice, and reinterpreting the meaning of "this civil rights thing." The reappearance and refinement of race consciousness in many critical race theory works symbolizes the break with the dominant civil rights discourse. For example, Mari Matsuda calls for a new jurispru- dence that would look "to the bottom," with the central idea that one's position in the social structure of race relations makes a qualitative differ- ence in how one sees and experiences the world.3 Kimberl6 Crenshaw argues that everyday institutional practices embody "white norms" that are camouflaged by a stance of cultural neutrality presented as "perspec- Copyright @ GARY PELLER 1990 * Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center. B.A. 1977, Emory; J.D. 1980, Harvard. I wish to thank Kimberl6 Crenshaw, Duncan Kennedy, Neil Gotanda, Gerald Torres, William Eskridge, Girardeau Spann, David Trubek, Nancy Ehrenreich, Theresa Miller, Amy Hill, Rina Ro- senberg, and Alan Freeman for their helpful comments on this essay. This Essay is dedicated to Lowell Dickerson, whose courage in struggle and clarity of vision have inspired and informed this work. 1. MALCOLM X, MALCOLM X SPEAKS 31 (G. Breitman ed. 1965) [hereinafter MALCOLM X SPEAKS]. 2. "Critical Race Theory" is the name of an informally organized group of scholars writing in the area of race law and theory; the group held its first conference in Madison, Wisconsin in July 1989. For a brief overview of the group's goals and perspectives, see Crenshaw, A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Law and Politics, in THE POLITICS OF LAW 195 (D. Kairys 2d ed. 1990). 3. Matsuda, Looking to the Bottom: CriticalLegal Studies andReparations, 22 HARV. C.R.- C.L. L. REv. 323 (1987). Vol. 1990:758] RACE CONSCIOUSNESS 759 tivelessness."'4 Gerald Torres demonstrates how legal categories embody dominant cultural assumptions that mistranslate the inner reality of Na- tive American communities and require cultural conformity as the price of legal recognition. 5 And Richard Delgado more generally contends that race makes a substantial difference in how scholars approach legal topics; he emphasizes storytelling and narrative as elements of a distinc- tive voice employed by people of color.6 The commitment to a race-conscious perspective by many critical race theorists is dramatic because explicit race consciousness has been considered taboo for at least fifteen years within mainstream American politics and for far longer within the particular conventions of law and legal scholarship. Instead, race has been understood through a set of beliefs-what I call "integrationist" ideology-that locates racial oppres- 4. Crenshaw, Race, Reform and Retrenchment Transformation and Legitimation in Antidis- crimination Law, 101 HARv. L. REV. 1331, 1379-80 (1988) [hereinafter Crenshaw, Race. Reform and Retrenchment] (discussing the "white norm... as a statement of the positive social norm, legitimating the continuing domination of those who do not meet it"); Crenshaw, Foreword- Toward a Race-ConsciousPedagogy in Legal Education, 11 NAT'L BLACK L.J. 1, 2 (1989) [hereinafter Cren- shaw, Foreword] (discussing the day-to-day culture of law schools as embodying a false assumption of "perspectivelessness"). 5. Torres & Milun, TranslatingYonnondio by Precedentand Evidence: The Mashpee Indian Case, 1990 DuKE LJ.625. 6. See Delgado, Storytellingfor Oppositionistsand Others. A Pleafor Narrative, 87 MICH. L. REV. 2411 (1989); Delgado, When a Story is Just a Story: Does Voice Really Matter?, 76 VA. L. REV.95 (1990); Delgado, The ImperialScholar: Reflections on a Review of Civil Rights Literature 132 U. PA. L. REv.561, 566-73 (1984) [hereinafter Delgado, The ImperialScholar]. I have referred only to a few of the writers in the emerging Critical Race Theory approach. Others who utilize a race conscious perspective in their work include Derrick Bell, see D. BELL, AND WE ARE NOT SAVED: THE ELUSIVE QUEST FOR RACIAL JusncE (1987) [hereinafter D. BELL, AND WE ARE NOT SAVED]; John Calmore, see Calmore, FairHousing vs. Fairhousing: The Problems with Providing Increased Housing Opportunities through Spatial Deconcentration, 14 CLEARINGHOUSE REV. 7 (1980) [hereinafter Calmore, FairHousing]; Calmore, Exploring the Signif- icance of Race and Class in Representing the Black Poor,61 OR. L. REV. 201 (1982); Harlon Dalton, see Dalton, The Clouded Prism, 22 HARv. C.R.-C.L. L. REv. 435 (1987); Neil Gotanda, see N. Gotanda, A Critique of "Our Constitution is Colorblind": Racial Categories and White Supremacy (unpublished manuscript) (available from author); Angela Harris, see Harris, Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory, 42 STAN. L. REV. 581 (1990); Charles Lawrence, see Lawrence, The Id, the Ego and Equal Protection: Reckoning With Unconscious Racism, 39 STAN. L. REV.317 (1987); Theresa Miller, see T. Miller, An Anti-Integrationist's Critique of School Desegregation: Making the Case for Black Colleges (unpublished manuscript) (available from author); Patricia Williams, see Williams, Alchemical Notes: ReconstructingIdeals from DeconstructedRights, 22 HARv. C.R.-C.L. L. REV. 401 (1987); Williams, The ObligingShell An Informal Essay on Formal Equal Opportunity, 87 MICH. L. REV. 2128 (1989) [hereinafter Williams, The Obliging Shell]; Robert Williams, see Williams, Taking Rights Aggressively: The Perilsand Promiseof CriticalLegal Theory for Peoples of Color, 5 LAw & INEQUALITY 103 (1987); Williams, The Algebra of FederalIndian Law: The Hard Trail of Decolonizing and Americanizing the White Man's IndianJurisprudence, 1986 Wis. L. REV. 219. Race consciousness in the work of Critical Race Theorists has been noted and criticized by Randall Kennedy in R. Kennedy, Racial Critiques of Legal Academia, 102 HARv. L. REv. 1745 (1989). DUKE LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 1990:758 sion in the social structure of prejudice and stereotype based on skin color, and that identifies progress with the transcendence of a racial con- sciousness about the world. In 1964, when Malcolm X asserted that this conventional interpretation of civil rights excluded black nationalists, he could not have foreseen that nationalist activism would revitalize and transform the struggle against racial oppression in the late 1960s and early 1970s, only to be relegated once more to the cultural margins and the desperate streets in the 1980s. But Malcolm X did identify the basic racial compromise that the incorporation of the "the civil rights struggle" into mainstream Ameri- can culture would eventually embody: Along with the suppression of white racism that was the widely celebrated aim of civil rights reform, the dominant conception of racial justice was framed to require that black nationalists be equated with white supremacists, and that race con- sciousness on the part of either whites or blacks be marginalized as be- yond the good sense of enlightened American culture. When a new generation of scholars embraced race consciousness as a fundamental prism through which to organize social analysis in the latter half of the 1980s, a negative reaction from mainstream academics was predictable. That is, Randall Kennedy's criticism of the work of critical race theorists for being based on racial "stereotypes" and "status-based" standards7 is coherent from the vantage point of the reigning interpretation of racial justice. And it was the exclusionary borders of this ideology that Mal- colm X identified. In this Essay, I want to explore the ideological roots of this particu- lar political moment-in which the repudiation of race consciousness de- fines conventional civil rights thinking-by contrasting integrationist and black nationalist images of racial justice, and by comparing the ways that white and black communities have understood race. My argument, in summary form, is that the boundaries of today's dominant rhetoric about race were set in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the context of an in- tense cultural clash between black nationalists on one side, and integra- tionists (white and black) on the other. Current mainstream race reform discourse reflects the resolution of that conflict through a tacit, enlight- ened consensus that integrationism-understood as the replacement of prejudice and discrimination with reason and neutrality-is the proper way to conceive of racial justice, and that the price of the national com- mitment to suppress white supremacists would be the rejection of race consciousness among African Americans. 7. See R. Kennedy, supra note 6, at 1786-1807. Vol. 1990:758] RACE CONSCIOUSNESS To understand the dynamics that produced this particular cultural bargain, it is important to comprehend the different
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