The Racialized Social System E-Book

Ali Meghji

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 280

Beschreibung

Far from its origins in US legal studies in the 1980s, critical race theory has grown to become a leading approach to the analysis of racial inequality around the world. It has courted much controversy along the way, often misunderstood and poorly defined. So what precisely is critical race theory and what makes it different from other theories of race, racialization and racism? In this incisive book, Ali Meghji defines the contours of critical race theory through the notion of the 'racialized social system'. He thereby excavates a solid social theory that clears up many empirical and conceptual questions that continue to surface, offering a flexible, practical model for studying structural racism. In making his case, Meghji pays attention to the multiple dimensions of The Racialized Social System, focusing on core phenomena such as interaction orders, material interests, ideologies, emotions, and organizations. In a context where any work mentioning 'race' gets defined as critical race theory, this book expounds an approach that promises to be more generative for the social scientific study of race.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Preface

Introduction: Critical Race Theory as Social Theory

The roots and routes of critical race theory

A ‘legal’ definition of CRT?

From a movement to a theory?

What is theoretical about critical race theory?

The racialized social system and practical social theory

Why does theory matter?

Towards the racialized social system approach

Internationalizing CRT: looking for the racialized social system approach

Chapter overviews

Notes

1 The Racialized Social System and Social Space: Racial Interests and Contestation

Defining the racialized social system: from ‘the state’ to ‘the structure’

Reflections on social space

The racial and the relational

The race for meaning

Relating ‘race’ to place

Contesting ‘race’ in social space

The trap of ‘racial conflict’ in the race relations model

Racial contestation beyond ‘race relations’

From racial contestation to racial interests: racial realism and the wages of whiteness

Racial realism or racial progress?

Maintaining an interest in whiteness

From racial interests back to racism

Notes

2 Racial Ideologies and Racialized Emotions: Seeing, Thinking and Feeling Race

Racial ideologies: from deception to perception

Colour-blind ideology in practice

Activating ideologies through emotional constellations

Emotions, ideologies and political conjunctures

Structures and individuals in racialized social systems

Notes

3 Theorizing the Racialized Interaction Order

The interaction order: from Goffman to the Black sociological tradition

The racialized interaction order

Interaction orders of non-interaction

The interactive making of race: micro aggressions, everyday racism, and racial action

Activating controlling images in the racialized interaction order

From controlling images to white habitus

Interactional cogs and the racial structure

Notes

4 Meso Racial Structures and Racialized Organizations

The vague promise(s) of analytical sociology

What are racialized organizations and what do they do?

From North American healthcare to Brazilian sugar mills

Racialized organizations and agency

Sport, racialization and agency

Workplaces as racialized organizations

Racialized organizations and the unequal distribution of resources

Moving to the top?

Cultural industries, racial grammars and racialized imagery

Notes

Conclusion: What is Critical about Critical Race Theory?

What about … ?

A global racialized social system?

The flexibility of the racialized social system approach: from DesiCrit to TribalCrit and BritCrit

Why CRT and not RT?

Why do we need CRT now?

CRT and the environment

CRT, the ‘racial justice as diversity training’ industry and the crisis of white liberalism

The hierarchy of racism(s)

Critical race theory and the quest for justice

Notes

References

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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The Racialized Social System

Critical Race Theory as Social Theory

Ali Meghji

polity

Copyright Page

Copyright © Ali Meghji 2022

The right of Ali Meghji to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2022 by Polity Press

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3994-9

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3995-6 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021950727

by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

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Preface

Just over a century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois published Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. This book is packed with history, theology, autoethnography, hymns and poetry. One of his central messages is that the world can be otherwise. We live in a time and geopolitical climate marked by anti-intellectualism and campaigns against critical thinking; nothing seems more clear than that we need the world to be otherwise, and thus I wish to begin this book with Du Bois’ comment:

From my narrowed windows I stare into the night that looms beneath the cloud-swept stars. Eastward and westward storms are breaking, – great, ugly whirlwinds of hatred and blood and cruelty. I will not believe them inevitable. I will not believe that all that was must be, that all the shameful drama of the past must be done again today before the sunlight sweeps the silver sea.

If I cry amid this roar of elemental forces, must my cry be in vain, because it is but a cry, – a small and human cry amid Promethean gloom?

Introduction: Critical Race Theory as Social Theory

In September 2020, President Donald Trump described critical race theory (CRT) as being ‘like a cancer’, labelling CRT as an anti-American ideology ‘deployed to rip apart friends, neighbours, and families’. This presidential furore resulted in an executive order which banned the teaching of CRT in employee training schemes run by the federal agency or any company with a government contract. Across the Atlantic, those in Britain were happy to echo Trump’s disparaging of CRT. The state’s Minister for Equalities, Kemi Badenoch, claimed that the government ‘stood unequivocally against critical race theory’, while reactionary actor-turned-politician Laurence Fox wrote: ‘Let’s call Critical Race theory by its real name. Modern Racism. It’s organised and it’s scary’,1 and journalist Guy Birchall exclaimed that ‘The type of people that whine about endemic white supremacy, critical race theory and “decolonising” things fundamentally dislike Britain and Western culture.’ Commentators in Australia likewise were criticizing CRT as being part of a grievance culture whereby ‘Any individual who fights against the Theory is deemed by the Theory to be racist anyway and will be condemned as racist by activists or the diversity police.’2

However, despite having a shared hostility towards CRT, such commentators often had quite disparate accounts of what CRT actually is. While Trump lumped together CRT with ‘Marxist ideology’ and the supposed militarism of Black Lives Matter, in Britain CRT was seen as being an offshoot of the ‘decolonizing’ movement which sought to recognize the darker side of Britain’s history, and in Australia CRT was seen as being part of a wider ‘wokeist’ social justice movement. Indeed, academics likewise have differed quite radically in their understandings of what CRT is. While several Marxist critics have seen CRT as being an assertion of race-centrism steeped in identity politics (for instance Cole 2009a, 2009b), other scholars more sympathetic to the CRT project have still described it as ‘not a unified theory but a loose hodgepodge of analytic tools that are frequently used in a catch-as-catch-can manner’ (Treviño et al. 2008: 9). Indeed, CRT is not even mentioned in Emirbayer and Desmond’s (2015: 1) recent survey of theories of race/ism, despite their assertion that ‘there never has been a comprehensive and systematic theory of race’.

In a sense, these brief anecdotes quite neatly summarize both why I write this book, and how I will approach the book’s content. On the one hand, this book is written very much as an attempt to define the conceptual contours of CRT through what has been termed the racialized social system approach. Through showing how the racialized social system approach is a social theory, this book therefore highlights how CRT offers a flexible framework used to study contemporary societal arrangements in a way that is grounded in empirical research. Central to the racialized social system approach is the attempt to show how racial inequality is embodied in the structure of society and reproduced through the micro, meso and macro levels. Of course, it is through exposing this structural presence of racism that CRT has managed to attract such a large following of reactionary disparagement. In this regard, I also write this book to show how the public and political responses to CRT often demonstrate the very same points that CRT seeks to make about how racism becomes ‘hidden away’ and denied in society. Furthermore, if we think about these public criticisms of CRT, they are not limited to one nation state but instead spread transnationally. While CRT is often construed as being a US-centric paradigm of thought, this book therefore shows how – by virtue of being a social theory grounded in empirical research – CRT offers a flexible approach to the study of racial inequality across space and time.

There is a difference between conceptual flexibility and theoretical universalism. As highlighted by postcolonial and decolonial approaches, universalism is characterized by an assumption that despite a theory ‘being the product of such a specific milieu […] the thoughts produced […] simply apply universally’ (Connell 2018: 401). Claims to universalism are thus layered in relations of epistemic domination, constituted by a chauvinism where the ‘Theory’ is the ‘Theory of everything’, and everything must be comprehended through the lens of this Theory.

It is not the aim of this book to present a picture of CRT as a conceptual framework that can study all dimensions of racialization and racism across all of time and space. Such a universalism, in fact, would be in tension with CRT’s mission to battle epistemic inequality and to theorize creatively in and through empirical research. Rather, it is my aim to show how CRT – particularly through the racialized social system approach – despite emerging from a very specific discipline of legal studies, at a very specific time in the US post-civil rights era, does in fact offer a flexible conceptual framework that is useful for the study of racialization and racism across the world. Of course, before proceeding into a fuller discussion of such conceptual flexibility, it is useful to first clarify these roots and routes of CRT.

The roots and routes of critical race theory

The reactionary criticisms of CRT – especially in the US – tend to paint a picture of CRT as being endemic across the arts, humanities and social sciences since the 1980s. The reality of the situation is that CRT actually has a narrower intellectual lineage.

Of course, it is undeniable that in the second half of the twentieth century, critical work on race and racism was growing in the US academy. Ironically, due to the widely held post-civil rights ideology, which assumed that racism was now a thing of the past, this critical scholarship was largely about bringing legitimacy to frames that centred racism as a primary axis of social organization. Thus, to name just a handful of paradigms, in the 1970s we had Joyce Ladner’s (1973) call to move beyond a ‘white sociology’ which ignored continuing racial inequality, and Robert Staples’ (1976) subsequent call for a Black sociology, which took Black knowledges and methods seriously as a rebuttal of the dominant post-civil rights ideology. In the 1980s, we had Angela Davis (1983) and Manning Marable’s (1983) re-engagement with racial capitalism theory, Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s (1986) racial formation theory, showing how the post-civil rights era constituted a racial project which was still based on racial hierarchization, and Patricia Hill Collins’ (1986) Black feminist sociology stressing the importance of those epistemological frames which get pushed to the peripheries of the academy for their centring of race and gender.

As scholars such as Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg (2002) have pointed out, when a group of US legal scholars in the 1980s started referring to their work as ‘critical race theory’, there was already a large amount of critical scholarship on race and racism that was circulating in the US academy. Similarly to this wide body of scholarship, the self-declared critical race theorists wanted to displace ideologies which downplayed the continuing significance of racism. It is with these critical legal scholars that I propose we begin our overview of CRT as a strain of social scientific thought, though we must keep in mind that they were not working in an epistemological prism, but rather were part of a wider movement of recentring critical perspectives on race and racism.

A ‘legal’ definition of CRT?

As a social scientific approach in law, CRT emerged at a specific historical moment in the US in the 1980s, with the aim of exposing the false rhetoric of the civil rights movement. At the material level, CRT scholars pointed out that twenty years after the introduction of civil rights legislation, Black people were actually worse off on many socio-economic measures; as Kimberlé Crenshaw (1988: 1333) summarized:

The African-American socioeconomic position in American society has actually declined in the last two decades. Average annual family income for African-Americans dropped 9% from the 1970’s to the 1980’s […] Since 1969, the proportion of Black men between 25 and 55 earning less than $5000 a year rose from 8% to 20 […] African-American enrollment in universities and colleges is also on the decline.

Such material statistics highlighted that despite the supposed legal guarantees of equality, the material justice which was called for during the civil rights movement was yet to be realized. Indeed, this material reality was connected to the additional retrenchment of the civil rights rhetoric at a discursive level. Crenshaw (1988) analyses this retrenchment through focusing on the rise of ‘new right’ neoliberalism and neoconservatism, which accelerated under Reagan’s administration in the 1980s. This neoconservative culture was constellated around the belief that ‘the goal of the civil rights movement – the extension of formal equality to all Americans regardless of color – has already been achieved’ (Crenshaw 1988: 1334). This new right vision – typified by thinkers such as Thomas Sowell – was held together by a contradictory view that the very existence of civil rights legislation was evidence that the US provided equal opportunities to everyone, and therefore that there was in fact no need for the continuing presence of such equal opportunities legislation. By a similar circular logic, such new right intellectuals and politicians argued that civil rights activists were demanding equal outcomes, rather than equal opportunities – and the duty of the state was only to offer the latter. Indeed, this neoconservatism was steeped in cultural racism in the way it argued that because Black Americans had equal opportunities but not equal outcomes, these unequal outcomes were the fault of Black people themselves for not taking advantage of their equal opportunities.

Of course, there are many critiques of this period of neoconservatism, especially from theorists of racial capitalism such as Angela Davis (1983). What sectioned off CRT as its own paradigm, however, was its empirical focus on how the US legal system was continuing to reproduce racial inequality in the supposed era of ‘civil rights’. It was in this context that CRT was deliberately focusing on how the US legal system was itself a racializing force – that is, how the US legal framework made race and sustained racial domination. As the advocates of this position put it themselves:3

We began to think of our project as uncovering how law was a constitutive element of race itself: in other words, how law constructed race […] Laws produced racial power not simply through narrowing the scope of, say, anti-discrimination remedies, nor through racially biased decision-making, but instead, through myriad legal rules […] that continued to reproduce the structures and practices of racial domination.

This is not to say that CRT scholars thought that the use of the legal system to sustain racial domination was by any means a ‘new’ development in racial politics. In contrast, such legal scholars were aware that this was primarily an issue of continuity, whereby the US legal system, since its birth, has been founded on the rationalization of white domination over racialized others. This is well spelled out in Cheryl Harris’ (1993) ‘Whiteness as property’, where she shows how the US legal system constituted a network of racializing and racist forces: from the US Constitution defining the enslaved as ‘three-fifths of all other persons’, the one-drop laws dictating that the children of enslaved Black women – even when the father was white – were themselves Black and therefore owned by the slaver, the legal use of the enslaved ‘as a stand-in for actual currency’ (Harris 1993: 1720) in legal disputes, and the Homestead Acts which reallocated indigenous land to white Americans and failed to recognize indigenous property ownership, it is clear that the US legal system has been used to define and maintain the racial status quo.

Rather than saying that the entanglement of racism and law was a new development, therefore, CRT scholars were interested in how this entanglement – or articulation – was playing out in the current moment of the post-civil rights era. Of particular interest to these thinkers was a desire to show how ‘civil rights reformism has helped to legitimize the very social practices – in employment offices and admissions departments – that were originally targeted for reform’ (Crenshaw et al. 1995: xv).

This critique of civil rights legislation actually facilitating further racial inequality is demonstrated in Derrick Bell’s scholarship.4 Take, for instance, Bell’s criticism of legal reform post-Brown v. Board of Education – the 1954 case which made it unconstitutional to segregate public schools by race. As Bell points out, the legacy of this case meant that US courts were much more concerned with questions of statistical, demographic desegregation (for instance, having schools that roughly represent the racial demographics of their district) rather than questions of actual educational quality which was accessible to Black students. This is important because in a context of civil rights legislation, many whites feared the integration of Black folks into their public institutions, and consequently took flight from their urban areas to create white enclaves.5 This meant that while educational segregation was de jure unconstitutional, it was de facto still very much the norm. Indeed, the US legal system was shaped so that such de facto segregation could not be understood as a form of discrimination; schools could only be accused of segregation if plaintiffs could prove that such segregation was itself the result of ‘discriminatory actions intentionally and invidiously conducted or organised by school officials’ (Bell 1995b: 24) – a criterion that was both equivocal and deliberately near-impossible to attain.

Part of the issue of this period, from the CRT position, therefore, was that the legal system only understood ‘racial discrimination’ through a ‘perpetrator perspective’ that does more harm than it does good.6 Through this perspective, ‘the law views racial discrimination not as a social phenomenon but merely as the misguided conduct of particular actors’7 – in other words, racism becomes an issue of bad actors rather than an issue of social (including legal) structure(s). This legal perspective on racism meant that there were many contradictory instances where anti-discrimination laws were invoked in courts to legitimize racial discrimination. An early case where this figured was Milliken v. Bradley (1974), where the Supreme Court refused a remedy for racial segregation in Detroit (where the whites had fled to the suburbs, leaving Black people concentrated in urban areas, de facto segregated both residentially and educationally in poorer social and educational spaces).8 Despite the district court proposing a scheme that would integrate across the urban and suburban schools, in order to battle educational segregation, the Supreme Court directly invoked the anti-discrimination law that ‘an inter-district remedy might be in order where the racially discriminatory acts of one or more school districts caused racial segregation in an adjacent district, or where district lines have been deliberately drawn on the basis of race’, but that they found no evidence of either of these violations.9

It was in this context, therefore, that CRT scholars argued that Black people were ‘worse off in terms of legal theory’ in the post-civil rights era ‘than they were under the former “separate but equal” doctrine’.10 Indeed, the veracity of this argument can be demonstrated through raising some questions: if civil rights legislation was supposed to realize racial equality, how could the very same laws be used by whites to claim anti-white discrimination in university admissions?11 If the legal system was supposed to bring material racial equality, how come the primary beneficiaries of the resulting affirmative action have been white women?12 These questions seem to point us towards the CRT position that, despite the pretence of being race-neutral, the US legal system is in fact deeply articulated in racialized processes.

From a movement to a theory?

Through its critiques of legal reform, CRT became recognized as a growing academic paradigm in the US – by critics and advocates alike. However, both critics and advocates of CRT failed to really spell out the ‘T’ in CRT – that is, they failed to really think about what made critical race theory theoretical. While critics saw this as a problem for CRT, advocates saw this absence of discussion as a deliberate strategy; upon reflection, Crenshaw (2011: 1261), for instance, claimed that:

CRT is not so much an intellectual unit filled with stuff – theories, themes, practices and the like […] In the same way that Kendall Thomas reasoned that race was better thought of as a verb rather than a noun, I want to suggest that shifting the frame of CRT toward a dynamic rather than static reference would be a productive means by which we can link CRT’s past to the contemporary moment.

In thinking of CRT as a verb rather than a noun, Crenshaw thus proposed we think of it as a practice, or methodology, for thinking about racism rather than as a theoretical framework per se. However, this did not mean that others in the CRT canon did not try to lay out some conceptual foundations of the CRT framework – and indeed, as we will see, scholars particularly in educational studies found these early attempts at making a CRT framework very fruitful for their analyses.

It was perhaps in Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s two books Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge (2000[1995]) and Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2001) that we see some of the early attempts to specify the key tenets of CRT in a way that still remains popular several decades later. While both Delgado and Stefancic were legal scholars firmly rooted in the ‘first wave’ of legally informed CRT scholarship, their tenets of CRT were – in theory – applicable well outside of the study of the legal system itself. These tenets were as follows.

1. Racism is ordinary, not aberrational. Central to CRT – as iterated by Delgado and Stefancic – is the idea that racism happens because of social arrangements, not in spite of them. This requires moving beyond the limited view of racism as an act of individual bigotry, and instead envisaging racism as a structural power relation. Such an argument, as Delgado and Stefancic show, had obvious connotations in the field of legal studies from which CRT emerged. As noted formerly, it meant that CRT scholars encouraged the US courts, judges and whole legal apparatus to go beyond an understanding of racial discrimination as something that had to be an intentional action by an actor, and instead to embrace an understanding of discrimination that also took into consideration the wider structural effects of racialization: whether that be the role of historical segregation on current relations, the use of officially ‘race-neutral’ criteria for certain jobs (e.g. a certain level of qualification, or score on a means test) which ends up disadvantaging Black Americans, race-neutral hiring or admissions policies which treat all racialized applicants as equal despite their differing locations in social hierarchies, and so on.

2. Racism serves important purposes. Once we conceive of racism as being ordinary, rather than being a ‘glitch’ in the system, we can gain an understanding of how it does not ‘just happen’ but serves specific purposes. Again, this was a point made in the context of legal studies that is simultaneously applicable outside the legal field. Early CRT scholars pointed out how racism functioned in the legal system not as an aberration, but as a means of both rationalizing and reproducing racial inequality. This can be seen in the aforementioned cases of anti-discrimination legislation being invoked to justify racial discrimination, just as much as it can be seen in the enforcement of constitutional colour blindness (for instance, in California’s Proposition 209 in 1996, which prohibited state governmental institutions from considering race in public employment, public contracting and public education), or in clauses in the US Constitution, such as in the 13th amendment, which prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude except as a punishment for a crime of which one has been convicted – all of which may appear to be race-neutral but are in fact deeply entrenched in producing racial inequality.

3. Race and races are products of social thought and relations. Here, we see CRT committing to a constructionist conception of race whereby ‘races’ are ‘not objective, inherent or fixed, they correspond to no biological or genetic reality; rather, races are categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient’ (Delgado and Stefancic 2000[1995]: 7). Of course, this constructionist approach resonates with the earlier CRT ethos of ‘uncovering how law was a constitutive element of race itself: in other words, how law constructed race’ (Crenshaw et al. 1995: xxv). Through this constructionist approach to the race and law, CRT was able to show how racialization was never an ‘even process’ but always a process that was itself embedded in power relations; from the definition of Black Americans as ‘property’ through the period of enslavement, through to legalization of the one-drop rule, and the legalized conversion of the Chinese from a nationality to a racial group in 1870 to justify the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1888.13

4. The importance of intersectionality. While CRT has been accused of race-centrism,14 intersectionality features as one of its foundational concepts. As Delgado and Stefancic (2000[1995]: 9) summarized in their CRT tenets: ‘No person has a single, easily stated, unitary identity […] everyone has potentially conflicting, overlapping identities, loyalties and allegiances.’ Indeed, one of the key pioneers of CRT – Kimberlé Crenshaw – was also a leading figure in developing intersectionality in the field of legal studies. This is not a coincidence. As Crenshaw (1989) argued, the legal system had no legislation to think about issues of gender and race as they are co-articulated. Take DeGraffenreid v. General Motors in 1976, where five Black women brought suit against General Motors, claiming that the business’ seniority system discriminated against Black women due to the fact that they did not hire any Black women prior to the 1964 civil rights legislation. The Court replied that ‘this lawsuit must be examined to see if it states a cause of action for race discrimination, sex discrimination, or alternatively either, but not a combination of both’ (quoted in Crenshaw 1989: 142). Given that (white) women had previously been hired by General Motors prior to 1964, the case for sex discrimination was rejected. Upon recommending that the case therefore be considered through the lens of race discrimination, and the Black women’s response that this defeats ‘the purpose of their suit since theirs was not purely a race claim’, the Court simply replied:15

The legislative history surrounding Title VII does not indicate that the goal of the statute was to create a new classification of ‘black women’ who would have greater standing than, for example, a black male. The prospect of the creation of new classes of protected minorities, governed only by the mathematical principles of permutation and combination, clearly raises the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora’s box.

As seen in this example, critical race emphasis on intersectionality, therefore, stressed not merely that inequalities are additive (for example, a Black woman being marginalized in terms of being a woman, and in terms of being Black) but rather that different inequalities are constituted and expressed through each other. It is safe to say, therefore, that while CRT has the word ‘race’ in it, as it emerged in critical legal studies, it was not simply about the study of racism as a something that could be studied as a singular, isolated ‘thing’; hence why intersectionality features as one of its defining concepts.

5. The ‘unique voice of color’. The final key tenet sits in an ‘uneasy tension with anti-essentialism’, to the extent that it holds ‘that because of their different histories and experiences with oppression, black, Indian, Asian, and Latino/a writers and thinkers may be able to communicate to their white counterparts matters that the whites are unlikely to know’ (Delgado and Stefancic 2001: 9).16 Through this notion of the ‘unique voice of color’, Delgado and Stefancic (2001: 9) demonstrate that a large part of the classical CRT methodology involved urging ‘black and brown writers to recount their experiences with racism and the legal system and to apply their own unique perspectives to assess law’s master narratives’. This last point is important. Encouraging legal scholars to recount their experiences connects with the Du Boisian tradition of autoethnography, and the belief that autobiography can be an effective mechanism for reflecting on large, social structural relations. This is exactly the point Crenshaw et al. (1995: xix) make when they claim that:

Critical Race Theory’s engagement with the discourse of civil rights reform stemmed directly from our lived experience as students and teachers in the nation’s law schools. We both saw and suffered the concrete consequences that followed from liberal legal thinkers’ failure to address the constrictive role that racial ideology plays in the composition and culture of American institutions, including American law school.

What was so groundbreaking about Delgado and Stefancic’s work was that it showed how the CRT work in critical legal studies had a clear conceptual foundation, and was not simply a movement of activist scholarship, but that these conceptual claims could also be taken up in other fields of inquiry beyond legal studies. It just so happened that it was particularly educational scholars in the US who first took to the task of engaging with this legal scholarship in a different field.

After Delgado and Stefancic’s scholarship in legal studies, CRT proliferated in US education studies throughout the 1990s and 2000s. The same year these books were published, Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) wrote a paper entitled ‘Toward a critical race theory of education’, with Solórzano (1997) further opening the field two years later in the paper ‘Images and words that wound: Critical race theory, racial stereotyping, and teacher education’. By this period of the late 1990s, CRT was rapidly growing its own canon in education studies, leading to William Tate’s (1997) review piece ‘Critical race theory and education: History, theory, and implications’. Edited collections on different applicants of CRT in US educational research then became the norm, with a 1998 Special Issue on ‘Critical Race Theory in Education’ in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (Parker et al. 1998), Parker et al. (1999) co-editing Race Is … Race Isn’t: Critical Race Theory and Qualitative Studies in Education,17 Ladson-Billings (2003) editing Critical Race Theory Perspectives on the Social Studies: The Profession, Policies, and Curriculum, and Dixson and Rosseau (2006) co-editing Critical Race Theory: All God’s Children Got a Song.18