Critical Race Theory: An Examination of Syllabi, Principles, and Contemporary Relevance

Critical Race Theory (CRT) emerged in the mid-1980s as a scholarly movement within legal academia. It challenged the conventional approaches to law and legal systems, particularly concerning racial inequities. This article explores the core principles of CRT, its application in academic syllabi, and its broader relevance in understanding contemporary social and legal issues.

The Genesis of Critical Race Theory

More than three decades ago, a new scholarly movement developed in the legal academy. This movement, Critical Race Theory, challenged the style and substance of conventional legal scholarship. CRT critiques the “objectivist” approach to the law and legal systems. Early critical race theorists, including Derrick Bell, Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence, Richard Delgado, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Patricia Williams, rejected formal equality, individual rights, and colorblind approaches to solving legal problems. Instead, critical race scholars have sought to show that the law is socially constructed and as such is influenced by institutional and individual perspectives. Scholars have also argued that race, class, gender, and sexual orientation have always played a critical role in legal outcomes. In putting forth such arguments, critical race scholars often employed new styles for legal scholarship, which include storytelling and narrative.

Core Tenets of CRT

CRT is characterized by several core tenets:

Rejection of Traditional Approaches: Critical race scholars have rejected traditional legal methods of addressing systemic racial inequities such as pursuing formal equality, individual rights, and colorblind methods.
Social Construction of Law: CRT scholars assert that the law is socially constructed and influenced by institutional and individual perspectives.
Intersectionality: Scholars argue that race, class, gender, and sexual orientation have always played a critical role in legal outcomes.
Narrative and Storytelling: Critical race scholars often employed new styles for legal scholarship, which include storytelling and narrative.

Critical Race Theory Colloquium: A Syllabus Overview

The Critical Race Theory Colloquium is designed to expose students to core CRT principles and interrogate CRT's possibilities and limitations. This endeavor will require students to think critically about race and racism in conjunction with other intersecting structures of oppression and hierarchy. The Critical Race Theory Colloquium employs a workshop-format that enables students to engage leading scholars in the field of Critical Race Theory. The first part of the semester will involve a general overview of Critical Race Theory. During the remaining meetings, invited scholars will present works-in-progress for discussion. To prepare, students will write short reaction papers that include three questions for further discussion. Final grades depend on the reaction papers, class participation, and attendance.

Course Objectives

A CRT course provides an opportunity to challenge basic assumptions about race, law, and racial justice in a respectful and collegial environment. Topics that are studied may include racial identity, the social construction of race, education, criminal justice, employment discrimination, and national security issues.

Course Structure and Assessment

A typical CRT course often uses a workshop format. Students engage with leading scholars and their works-in-progress. Assessment is typically based on reaction papers, class participation, and attendance.

CRT and the Law

To understand the deep interconnections between race and law, and particularly the ways in which race and law are mutually constitutive, is an extraordinary intellectual challenge. That is precisely the project of Critical Race Theory (CRT). The point of departure for the course is an exploration of race itself-what exactly is race?-and the role law plays in constructing race and alternatingly ameliorating and perpetuating racism.

Challenging Conventional Anti-Discrimination Thinking

CRT refers to a surge of legal scholarship, starting in the late 1980s and blossoming in the 1990s, that challenged conventional anti-discrimination thinking. According to the conventional narrative (then and probably still dominant in legal thinking about racial discrimination), discrimination on the basis of race could be effectively alleviated by expanding constitutional or statutory rights and then allowing aggrieved parties to file claims seeking remedies from governmental or private wrongdoers. In contrast, CRT scholars view racism as institutional and as baked into both American law and society. They have sharply criticized doctrines such as the intent requirement (the idea that discrimination must be intentional in order to be actionable) as overly narrow and reformist rather than structural in nature, to provide just one example.

Contrasting CRT with Liberal and Conservative Frameworks

This course will pursue this project by exploring emerging themes within CRT. Contrary to the traditional notion that racial subordination represents a deviation from the liberal legal ideal, this body of work recasts the role of law as historically central to and complicit in upholding racial hierarchy as well as hierarchies of gender, class, and sexual orientation, among other others. We will focus on the origins of the critique and the contrasts between CRT and liberal and conservative analytical frameworks on race and American law and society. We will also examine some of the questions and criticisms raised about CRT, from both inside and outside the genre, as well as the impact of the work on legal and political discourses.

CRT and Contemporary Issues

CRT provides a framework for analyzing various contemporary issues.

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Education

In recent months, there has been political discussions of AP African American Studies, particularly by Governors of conservative states. This has brought into question how and why AP African American Studies should be taught. Further to Brown v. Board of Education, courts generally considered this ruling as providing “equal educational opportunities.” However, if AP African American Studies courses are banned and restricted for being “dangerous,” our students are clearly not being granted equal access to learn all social, political, and historical realities which are a part of African American Studies and, therefore, a part of the American experience.

As Carter G. Woodson highlighted, “The experience of college instructors shows that racial attitudes of the youth are not easily changed after [youths] reach adolescence” (1933, p.47). Therefore, although it could be argued that it would be beneficial if all students were introduced to African American Studies as part of American Studies courses prior to college, our nation is not at this juncture. As it currently stands, AP African American Studies is provided to some students nearing college age, who are given the opportunity to explore rich insights that can be gained from the exploration of AP African American Studies. This program considers political, sociological, historical, gendered, and justice experiences related to African Americans. As the legal implications of the social injustices faced by African Americans within society remains far from settled, such courses have the propensity to highlight the embeddedness of racism in American society which has its foundations in slavery.

Criminal Justice

CRT is also applied to the analysis of the criminal justice system. CRT scholars analyze issues such as: reparations for past race-based injustice; social movements to combat racism; police violence against and incarceration of disproportionate numbers of people (especially men) of color; laws and policies toward migrants.

Key Texts on Incarceration and Justice:

Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture, by Angela Davis. This work collects a series of interviews with Angela Davis discussing resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison.
Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis. These prisons house hugely disproportionate numbers of people of colour, betraying the racism embedded in the system, while studies show that increasing prison sentences has had no effect on crime.
Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era, by Dan Berger. Dan Berger offers a reconsideration of twentieth century black activism, the prison system, and the origins of mass incarceration.
The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, by Khalil Gibran Muhammad.
Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition, by Liat Ben-Moshe.
The End of Policing, Alex Vitale. This book examines the origins of modern policing as a tool of social control and shows how the expansion of police authority is inconsistent with community empowerment, social justice - even public safety.
The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, by Naomi Murakawa. Murakawa inverts the conventional wisdom by arguing that the expansion of the federal carceral state - a system that disproportionately imprisons blacks and Latinos - was, in fact, rooted in the civil-rights liberalism of the 1940s and early 1960s, not in the period after.
From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: the Making of Mass Incarceration in America, by Elizabeth Hinton.
Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California by Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, by James Forman, Jr.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander. Alexander shows how the mass incarceration of a disproportionate number of black men amounts to a devastating system of racial control.
Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment, ed. Angela Davis.
Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter, ed. Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton.
Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State, by Garrett Felber.

Criticisms and Controversies

CRT has faced criticism and controversy, particularly from conservative circles. Many of the laws single out “critical race theory” as the curricular bogeyman. The right would be happy to keep the conversation at the level of obfuscation, divorced from reality and history.

Governors DeSantis of Florida and Huckabee-Sanders of Arkansas, have found value in problematizing AP African American Studies and Critical Race Theory, conflating the two as being the same for what appears to be their own political ambition.

Concerns about Historical Accuracy and Perspective

Critics argue that CRT distorts history and promotes division. They suggest to our students that they do not need to learn the truth about America’s history is clearly wrong. It may be uncomfortable for beneficiaries of wrongs done in the past, because it reveals that their contemporary privilege is not merely the result of their sacrifice, but it is a direct result of the lives sacrificed and devalued through slavery, racial segregation, and Jim Crow.

The Importance of Honest Education

Our students can handle a past that is complicated and honest enough to provide substantial insights into today’s society. But it is this meaningful link between past and present that terrifies the Right.

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