Critical Race Theory

Central Tenets

Bell was instrumental in establishing the “critical” attitude of CRT toward mainstream thought on race by questioning some of the sacred cows of the civil rights movement: the value of integration and the power of moral suasion and legal argument. Another central tenet of CRT appears in Bell's writings—the idea of the permanence of racism. Bell and other critical race theorists argue that many participants in and supporters of the civil rights movement were too optimistic about the prospects for overcoming racism in American society.

The mainstream view, according to this line of thought, is to see racism as an aberration in American law and society. Alternatively, critical race theorists argue that racism is the normal condition of the American legal and social systems, deeply embedded in them, and that there are no reasonable prospects for removing racism from social and legal institutions in the foreseeable future. This pessimism about eliminating racism and its legacies from American society is partly a result of the lack of progress toward racial justice that many critical race theorists perceive in the decades following the civil rights movement.

On the whole, then, critical race theorists have a distinctive perspective on the state of the law and of American society as they relate to race. Where others see the civil rights movement and its legal achievements as a triumph for racial justice that demonstrates the fundamentally fair nature of American law and society, critical race theorists take a very different view. They see the civil rights movement largely as a triumph for white America, whose interests were no longer served by segregation. Similarly, while many observers see much progress toward racial equality in the post–civil rights era, critical race theorists see little progress. Progress has taken place, they argue, only to the degree and in the forms that serve white interests.

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