Critical Race Theory

Early Strands

CRT existed in embryonic form in the decades of the 1970s and 1980s in the writing of individual legal scholars concerned that the gains of the Civil Rights Movement were vulnerable to erosion and backlash. Notable originators of CRT include the late Alan Freeman, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Cheryl Harris, Charles Lawrence, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia Williams. Perhaps the most prominent exponent in the early generation was Derrick Bell. A veteran civil rights lawyer and the first tenured Black professor at Harvard Law School (now a visiting professor of law at New York University), Bell argued that U.S. jurisprudence on racial issues, even when seemingly liberal in thrust, serves to entrench racism and that in the post-civil rights era, although legal segregation and institutional discrimination have been struck down, formally neutral laws continue to uphold White racial domination.

Bell developed a theory based on “converging interests,” or the idea that Blacks will advance only if their interests converge with the interests of the White majority. Since racism benefits many Whites materially and psychologically, as a group they have little incentive to transcend it. In the face of White resistance, justice for Black Americans will be sidelined; some evidence for this may be seen in setbacks surrounding school busing and other integration measures following in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

In its critique of liberalism and its pessimism visà-vis incremental approaches to racial reform, CRT draws broadly from older currents of thought borrowed from Antonio Gramsci, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as newer ways of thinking linked to the Black Power, Chicano, and radical feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

By the 1980s, these currents distilled into what could be discerned as an intellectual movement. It first emerged in 1981, when students at Harvard Law School organized a boycott in the wake of the departure of Professor Bell and in protest against what they viewed as the inadequate legal-institutional engagement with race. One consequence was the formation of a student-organized alternative course on race and the law.

In the mid-1980s, there occurred a series of forums hosted by Critical Legal Studies (CLS), a closely aligned progressive movement within the law that aims to debunk the ostensibly value-neutral posture of the law and expose its deeply political role in maintaining an unjust social order. CRT scholars challenged CLS with paying undue attention to class and economic structures at the expense of race and urged CLS to pay better attention to the particularity of race and its formative role in not just reflecting and upholding but also producing racial power and constituting racial subjects.

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