Don’t Start Here: A Critique of an Introduction to CRT

While working on an essay about presentations of Critical Race Theory (CRT), I decided to read the “Introduction” to Richard Delgado’s and Jean Stefancic’s CRT Reader. Delgado and Stefancic are pioneering CRT scholars who wrote the most influential introduction to the legal movement. Knowing that their Reader’s intro was brief, I wanted to see what they choose to list as central CRT themes within this truncated form.

Two pages into the four-page intro, I read the following line: “CRT begins with a number of basic insights.”

“Here we go,” I thought. “Let’s see what they list.” This is an abridged version of what I read:

CRT begins with a number of basic insights. One is that racism is normal, not aberrant, in American society…Starting from the premise that a culture constructs its own social reality in ways that promote its own self-interest, these scholars set out to construct a different reality. Our social world, with its rules, practices, and assignments of prestige and power, is not fixed; rather, we construct it with words, stories, and silence…A third premise underlying much of critical race theory is interest convergence. Developed by Derrick Bell, this concept holds that white elites will tolerate or encourage racial advances for blacks only when these also promote white self-interest…Most mainstream scholars embrace universalism over particularity, and abstract principles and the rule of law over perspectivism (an approach characterized by an emphasis on how it was for a particular person at a particular time and place. Clashing with this more traditional view, CRT writers emphasize the opposite, in what has been termed the “call to context.” For CRT scholars, general laws may be appropriate in some areas (such as, perhaps, trusts and estates or highway speed limits), but political and moral discourse is not one of them. Normative discourse (which civil rights is) is highly fact sensitive, which means that adding even one new fact can change intuition radically… Each of the prime central themes just mentioned…

At this point, I stopped reading and reviewed my marginal notes. I had Delgado and Stefancic listing four basic insights or premises: (1) racism is normal, not aberrant in American society; (2) cultures construct their own social reality in ways that promote its own self-interest; (3) Bell’s interest-convergence thesis; and (4) the “call to context.”

Having reviewed what I’d noted, I picked up where I left off and read the following sentence.

Each of the prime central themes just mentioned—the insistence that racism is ordinary and not exceptional, the notion that traditional civil rights law has been more valuable to whites than to blacks, the critique of liberalism, and the call to context—has come in for criticism.

Delgado and Stefancic listed four insights or premises—but they weren’t the same as mine. There summary list said nothing about culture construction; didn’t offer a clear restatement of Bell’s interest-convergence thesis; and introduce the “critique of liberalism” line. Confused, I reviewed the previous two pages. “Surely I’ve misread something,” I thought.

I hadn’t. The summary list Delgado and Stefancic provide does not match their discussion of CRT’s basic insights/premises. I’m unsure why. Moreover, I’m shocked to see this level of discontinuity in the third edition of their Reader.

If you’re interested in a better preliminary treatment of central themes in CRT by Delgado and Stefancic, I recommend reading the first chapter of their famous introductory textbook on CRT.