Critical Race Theory

Despite the relatively recent appearance of critical race theory (CRT) in academia, it has become an indispensable perspective on race and racism in America. CRT launched what many race scholars now take as a commonsense view: the view that race, instead of being biologically grounded and natural, is socially constructed. However, unlike some views that argue that aspects of race should be eliminated from everyday speech, thought, and scholarship, CRT maintains that race, as a socially constructed concept, functions as a means to maintain the interests of Whites who construct(ed) it and is an indispensable lens from which to view the problem of racism. According to CRT, racial inequality emerges from the social, economic, and legal differences Whites create between “races” to maintain elite White interest in labor markets and politics, and as such create the circumstances that give rise to poverty and criminality in many minority communities. In this regard, CRT holds that the laws and policies in the United States will always be geared toward people of color's detriment and as such have focused their scholarship on the ways in which people of color are punished by White legal institutions. CRT is interested in both in how the actions of White institutions create and maintain the conditions of “racial criminality,” and, more important, how White structures and governing entities punish and persecute these constructions of “racial criminality” on the gendered bodies of racialized people.

Though the intellectual origins of the movement go back much further, the movement [Page 167]officially organized itself in July 1989, marking its separation from critical legal studies (CLS). Instead of drawing theories of social organization and individual behavior from continental European thinkers like Hegel and Marx or psychoanalytic figures like Freud as its theoretical predecessors (CLS and feminist jurisprudence), CRT was inspired by the American civil rights tradition through figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., and W. E. B. Du Bois, and from nationalist thinkers such as Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and Frantz Fanon. Being steeped in radical Black thought and nationalist thinking, critical race theory advanced theoretical understandings of the law, politics, and American sociology that focused on the efforts Whites have historically used to maintain colonialism and White supremacy against people of color.

Given the ways in which race is defined and contoured by the interests of Whites in American society, CRT exposes a sociocultural component of the American race problem and the rampant incarceration of people of color. CRT holds a guarded pessimism about the racial conditions in the United States; even though Whites seek to maintain power and keep America a White republic, people of color, especially Blacks, are demonized as criminals and victimized by the courts, the police, and the everyday stereotypes of White America. Critical race theorists maintain that racism in America is normal, not aberrant, and as such, the laws, policies, and justice system are all built to maintain the power and historical stature of Whites. Though crime and criminal justice comprise a relatively small portion of CRT scholarship, critical race theorists have introduced novel claims that range from arguments maintaining the criminal justice system is fundamentally racist to positions that contend that White male experiences form the basis of the actions committed by a reasonable person under duress. This entry briefly discusses the origins of CRT and outlines some of its major theoretical contributions to analysis of race and crime.

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