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James Lindsay v. Critical Race Theory

#ConceptualDisinformation Vol. 1

Samuel Hoadley-Brill May 3

What is critical race theory (CRT)?

To attempt a rough, one-sentence summary: CRT is an approach to legal scholarship that works from the premises of pervasive racial inequality and a social constructionist (i.e. anti-essentialist) conception of race; challenges the idea that the superficially colorblind nature of the law means the law is race-neutral; and seeks to explain how landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s failed to deliver on its promises of equality for the racial minorities it was supposed to uplift.

As my professor Charles Mills explains in the epilogue of Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism, critical race theorists take up two tasks. The first is descriptive: “to recognize and theorize the centrality of race and white supremacy to the making of the modern world”; and the second is prescriptive: “[to recognize and theorize] the implications for normative theory and an expanded vision of what needs to be subjected to liberatory critique to achieve social justice.”

It is important to note here that Mills is using white supremacy to denote racial domination of whites over non-whites, not the ideology of white supremacist groups like the KKK, which I would call white supremacism. Racists believe in racism; white supremacists believe in white supremacism. Anyway, back to the subject at hand.

3. Critical race theory challenges ahistoricism and insists on a contextual/ historical analysis of the law. Current inequalities and social/institutional practices are linked to earlier periods in which the intent and cultural meaning of such practices were clear. More important, as critical race theorists we adopt a stance that presumes that racism has contributed to all contemporary manifestations of group advantage and disadvantage along racial lines, including differences in income, imprisonment, health, housing, education, political representation, and military service. Our history calls for this presumption.

At first glance, this may look a failure to recognize that correlation does not entail causation. But what the authors are claiming is not the naive thesis that every racial disparity is attributable to racism. The claim is that, given the history of the United States’ treatment of racial minorities—coupled with the commitment to social constructionism about race—we can safely make a defeasible assumption that a complete causal analysis of any particular (dis)advantage along racial lines will include some racist policy or practice.