What is “Critical Race Theory”? A Meditation on Several Answers. (Part III)
Note
This is the third meditation of a multipart series considering different proposals about what constitutes Critical Race Theory’s common themes (or, for some, central tenets). The first meditation is here; the second is here.
To be clear: The goal of this series is to consider and compare how some self-identified CRT scholars have characterized CRT in print. I am not offering a definitive take on which, if any, of these characterizations is correct. Still, seeing and comparing these presentations should help many who are asking, “What is Critical Race Theory?”
Enjoy y ¡Saludos!
Signposting
This post has three parts. First, I discuss the historic context of Derrick Bell’s first published presentation of CRT’s common themes in 1995. Because Bell is CRT’s principal founder, we do well to consider how he describes CRT in print. Second, I offer a close reading of Bell’s essay (Caveat: This section has four subsections). Third, I conclude with a brief intermission noting what I did and did not say.
Part One: Background
Five years had passed since Richard Delgado offered the first published list of CRT’s common themes in a footnote of an essay responding to Randall Kennedy’s seventy-five-page lambasting of Mari Matsuda, Derrick Bell, and Delgado—all CRT founders. Kennedy’s essay had hit the press about a month before the CRT’s founding conference (July 8, 1989). During that conference, Delgado presented a draft of his rejoinder to Kennedy. Yes, Delgado was defending his own work (see here, here, and here). But he was also defending a burgeoning race-conscious movement within legal studies.
Yet neither Delgado’s nor other replies to Kennedy (e.g., here and here) had removed the sting or mitigated the national prominence of Kennedy’s critique. As CRT scholar John Calmore wrote in 1992, “To date, the most jarring criticism of critical race scholars’ distinctive voice orientation comes from Randall Kennedy, a black professor at Harvard Law School.”
Kennedy’s criticism had been especially difficult on Derrick Bell. The two taught together at Harvard Law School from 1986-1991, when Bell took a leave of absences from HLS to protest its failure to hire any racialized minority women. Respect and mutual efforts to promote racial justice had characterized their first two years together on HLS’s faculty. Then Kennedy published his scathing critique. In a personal letter to Kennedy, Bell described the critique as “bitter medicine” (see page 96 of this essay). Bell knew that Kennedy’s essay would gain national prominence largely because it was an instance of a Black scholar chiding racialized minority scholars promoting racial justice. Bell wove this claim into a fictional short story in Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992).
[Narrator talking with a character named Geneva Crenshaw]
“Shouldn’t, Geneva asked, “all but the most insensitive be able to distinguish a peoples’ plaintive efforts to protest racism from a company’s product-enhancing puffery?”
“Perhaps—but, distinguishing or not, it galls me that black scholars who labor in relative obscurity can leap to instant attention and acclaim by criticizing their black colleague. This happened when Professor Randall Kennedy at Harvard Law School asserted that minority scholars have no special legitimacy in writing about race, and that their scholarship, measured by traditional standards, is flawed. Had Kennedy been lauding black legal scholars, his article would have been treated as just another piece of special pleading.”
“But wait!” Geneva interrupted. “The several pieces I have read by Professor Kennedy are well done and tend to give white folks hell.”
“Precisely my point. None of those articles have been covered by the New York Times.”
Bell’s fictional characters don’t address the quality of Kennedy’s critique. That’s not the point of their conversation. Instead, their exchange illuminates the practice of what Bell calls enhanced racial standing: A Black scholar is likely to gain recognition and fame when he or she critiques racialized minority scholars for speaking or acting in ways that upset whites. Kennedy and his critique drew the New York Times’ attention and praise; this “progressive” paper did not give CRT rejoinders similar treatment.
Moreover, Kennedy’s critique inspired others like it. Daniel Farber’s and Suzanna Sherry’s work are representative of these rejections of CRT. (For Farber, see here; for Farber and Sherry, see here.)
Social circumstances exacerbated the irritation these critiques caused CRT scholars. The recession of 1990-91 proved another historic catalyst of increased, economic-based racial tension (for more on this history, see Bell’s Silent Covenants). So did the appointment of Clarence Thomas to replace the late Thurgood Marshall’s on the Supreme Court (1991). Many Blacks saw this appointment as a token example of the enhanced racial standing Bell described: Thomas’s opposition to affirmative action and other civil rights remedies propelled his career. For Republican President Bush, Thomas was a “safe” pick. (Note: Bell found Clarence Thomas’s appointment particularly egregious, for Bell had worked alongside Thurgood Marshall in numerous desegregation cases. For more on their relationship, see Bell’s Ethical Ambition.) Then there was the recorded police brutality of Rodney King and eventual acquittal of the police involved (1992), the latter of which sparked national riots.
Seizing on heightened racial tensions and white fears, Democrats and Republicans championed the need to be “tough on crime.” As Melissa Hickman Barlow demonstrates, the modern version of racist call originated in the 1960s linking of Blackness and Crime (see, e.g., the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Acts of 1968, or Newsweek’s March 1965 report of a former high-raking US administrative official declaring that “to speak of crime today is to speak of Negro Crime.”). Within this racist climate, presidential candidate Bill Clinton declared that he was not “soft on crime,” backing his claim by breaking from the campaign trail to return to Arkansas during the execution of Ricky Ray Rector (January 1992). That same year Clinton also attacked rapper and activist Sister Souljah (her response is here.), thus playing on white resentment for this “Black,” “ghetto” music and the “gangster mentality” it promoted.
Once Clinton became president, members of Congress brought the call for a new crime bill to a fever pitch. Senator Joe Biden delivered an infamous speech demanding such a bill in 1993. According to Biden, there was a “cadre of young people, tens of thousands of them, born out of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure, without any conscience developing because they literally … because they literally have not been socialized, they literally have not had an opportunity.” Biden argued that Congress “should focus on them now” because “if we don’t, they will, or a portion of them, will become the predators 15 years from now.” Biden acknowledged that he did not care “why someone is a malefactor in society”; he simply wanted such criminals “away from my mother, your husband, our families.” In 1994, President Clinton signed the Crime Bill Congress passed. (Note: Biden’s talk of “predators” predated John Dilulio’s false theory about “superpreadators.” Dilulio, a political scientist at Princeton Unviresity, began popularizing in 1995. President Clinton eventually invited Dilulio to attend a working dinner on juvenile crime at the White House.)
While Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court promoted racist policies and decisions (e.g., Shaw v. Reno, 1993), academics Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein published a collection of racist ideas in The Bell Curve. Murray and Herrnstein argue that the US needs to advance policies that reflect the supposed intellectual superiority of whites over, for example, Blacks and Latinas/os. Here’s what they have in mind (emphasis in original).
We are silent partly because we are as apprehensive as most other people about what might happen when a government decides to social-engineer who has babies and who doesn’t. We can imagine no recommendation for using the government to manipulate fertility that does not have dangers. But this highlights the problem: The United States already has policies that inadvertently social-engineer who has babies, and it is encouraging the wrong women. If the United States did as much to encourage high-IQ women to have babies as it now does to encourage low-IQ women, it would rightly be described as engaging in aggressive manipulation of fertility. The technically precise description of America’s fertility policy is that it subsidizes births among poor women, who are also disproportionately at the low end of the intelligence distribution. We urge generally that these policies, represented by the extensive network of cash and services for low-income women who have babies, be ended.
The government should stop subsidizing births to anyone, rich or poor. The other generic recommendation, as close to harmless as any government program we can imagine, is to make it easy for women to make good on their prior decision not to get pregnant by making available birth control mechanisms that are increasingly flexible, foolproof, inexpensive, and safe.
The other demographic factor we discussed in Chapter 15 was immigration and the evidence that recent waves of immigrants are, on the average, less successful and probably less able, than earlier waves. There is no reason to assume that the hazards associated with low cognitive ability in America are somehow circumvented by having been born abroad or having parents or grandparents who were. An immigrant population with low cognitive ability will — again, on the average — have trouble not only in finding good work but have trouble in school, at home, and with the law.
Social Darwinism and racist eugenics policies make a resounding return to the public square in Murray and Herrnstein’s 845-page tome. Indeed, The Bell Curve quickly became best-seller.
These circumstances informed the University of Illinois College of Law’s decision to invite Derrick Bell to deliver the 1995 David C. Baurn Memorial Lectures on Civil Liberties and Civil Rights. Bell’s task was to twofold: Comment on The Bell Curve and explain what Critical Race Theory is. Let’s consider his remarks.
Part Two: Turning to Derrick Bell
The Essay’s Structure:
Bell divides his lecture-turned published essay into four parts. “Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory?” begins with a discussion of The Bell Curve. Here Bell uses CRT methods to evaluate the book’s purpose and reception. Section two, the longest of the essay, takes up two questions about CRT: What is it? What ought it be? Bell links this and the previous section by noting that those unfamiliar with CRT will want to know more about it since they just witnessed CRT methods in action. Section three offers a brief presentation of Spirituals. And section four, the conclusion, relates the Spirituals to CRT.
This structure is revealing. Bell dedicates five of seventeen pages to assessing The Bell Curve (pp.893-898). After using the title as a transition to begin section two, he never mentions the book again. Hence, the bulk of this essay is about showing, naming, and defending CRT (pp. 898-910). Section one shows CRT. Section two names and defends CRT. And sections three and four further defend CRT by linking it to Spirituals. As the title suggests, this essay is principally about CRT. Even Bell’s discussion of The Bell Curve serves to highlight CRT’s usefulness.
Section One: The Bell Curve
Bell’s goal in section one is to show CRT through a radical, CRT-informed assessment of The Bell Curve. This assessment rests upon a key assumption: The book’s theses and policy suggestions relies upon long-disproven claims about racial intelligence and the heritability of intelligence. Citing scholars such as Steven Fraser and Stephen Jay Gould, Bell writes:
[The thesis that the US should make policies based upon differences in racial intelligences between Blacks and whites] has been criticized as the rehashing of views long-ago rejected by virtually all experts in the field. There is, critics maintain, no basis for a finding that intelligence is inherited and, indeed, no accepted definition of the vague term “intelligence.” There is, on the other hand, a depressingly strong and invariant correlation between resources and race in this country, and resources and success—including success in taking I.Q. tests. These are settled facts.
The Bell Curve is riddled with racist lies biologists and psychologists have long rejected. Its authors surely know this.
But if Murray and Herrnstein knew their book’s arguments presumed numerous false, racist theories, why did they publish? And why publish it in 1994, a time, as we’ve seen, marked by white racism? As Bell asks: “Why did these two well-known men produce a book filled with rejected theories? Surely they must have known that the book would provide pseudoscientific support for racial hostilities that always worsen during times of economic stress and anxiety.” Bell, ever the contextualizing reader, reminds his audience of The Bell Curves’ historic, racial, and economic context.
Bell grants that an easy answer to our questions is to say the “authors saw a market opportunity and they took it.” But he wants to offer a more illuminating answer and assessment. To this end, Bell employs a satire-laden series of imagined, though historically informed, reasons why, if Murray and Herrnstein had learned that Blacks performed higher than whites did on I.Q. tests, they would have written the same book. This approach is patented Bell. He, like many CRT scholars, evaluates “the motivation for and the likely intention of racial policies in America” by “[reversing] the racial composition of the major components of those policies.” As Bell writes, “To see things as they really are, you must imagine them for what they might be.”
Bell concludes that his series of imagined reasons reveals Murray and Herrnstein wrote The Bell Curve “to delegitimize the illegitimate.” The book “captured the nation’s fascination precisely because it laid out in scientific jargon what many whites believe, need desperately to believe, but dare not reveal in public or even to their private selves.” Murray and Herrnstein have offered a racist book that mirrors the racist moment—one in which a presidential candidate needs to prove he’s “tough on crime” and a Senator promulgates racist ideas about “predators” whose existence requires specific policies that will keep them “away from my mother, your husband, our families.” Bell contends that his offering an imagined, historically informed take on the reversal of The Bell Curve’s policy proposals shows that “the critical race theory perspective offers blacks and their white allies insight, spiked with humor, as a balm for this latest insult, and enables them to gird themselves for those certain to follow.”
I conclude my reading of this section with two points. First, readers should note that Bell’s engagement with The Bell Curve operates within a Black-white binary. Therefore, he does not treat the book’s claims about Latina/o intelligence or immigration policies. Second, Bell’s CRT-derived conclusion echoes a conclusion by Stephen Jay Gould reached and that Bell quoted near the essay’s start. Gould writes:
The Bell Curve, with its claims and supposed documentation that race and class differences are largely caused by genetic factors and are therefore essentially immutable, contains no new arguments and presents no compelling data to support its anachronistic social Darwinism, so I can only conclude its success in winning attention must reflect the depressing temper of our time—a historical moment of unprecedented ungenerosity, when a mood for slashing social programs can be powerfully abetted by an argument that beneficiaries cannot be helped, owing to inborn cognitive limits expressed as low I.Q. scores.
Gould and Bell agree that The Bell Curve reflects the racism of its time. But Bell’s historically informed imagining challenges Gould. For Bell, the present historic is not “a moment of unprecedented ungenerosity.” It reflects the historic pairing of the national endorsement of racist ideas with national economic strains. Bell and Gould therefore reach similar but importantly different conclusions.
Section Two: What is CRT? What ought CRT be?
Having shown how a common CRT method illuminated the motivation behind The Bell Curve, Bell addresses two questions: What is CRT? What ought CRT be?
He starts by noting that whereas “the answers to what is critical race theory are fairly uniform and quite extensive,” answers about what it ought to be “are far from uniform and, not coincidentally, tend to be leveled in the form of outsider criticism rather than insider inquiry.” These contrasting claims anticipate the section’s two foci: a positive presentation of CRT and a response to outsider criticism about what it should be.
Bell offers a succinct working definition of CRT. “Critical race theory is a body of legal scholarship, now about a decade old, a majority of whose members are both existentially people of color and ideologically committed to the struggle against racism, particularly as institutionalized in and by law.” Initially, Bell appears to identify CRT with a body of legal scholarship; CRT is a set of texts. Yet, after noting that CRT is nearly a decade old, Bell mentions the CRT has members. Bell’s definition therefore has conceptual flaws: a body of legal scholarship is not the sort of thing that has human members. This conceptual flaw was absent in Delgado’s presentation of CRT which I considered in the previous post. Delgado notes that CRT refers to a “loose coalition” of authors producing legal scholarship. Recall, too, Delgado saying that CRT has “no formal membership or organizational structure.” These features had not changed when Bell published this essay. CRT remained a loose coalition without formal membership or organizational structure. Of course, those within the coalition were members in a secondary sense. And they were producing legal scholarship aimed at analyzing and resisting racism, “particularly as institutionalized in and by law.”
Bell’s and Delgado’s presentations differ on other points, too. Bell explicitly notes that the majority of CRT scholars are racialized minorities; Delgado does not. Bell then writes that “those critical race theorists who are white are usually cognizant of and committed to the overthrow of their own racial privilege.” Delgado’s essay only considered ideas about “privileging” white and nonwhite voices in legal scholarship, and this to reply to Kennedy’s implicit claim about CRT appearing to suffer from something like reverse-voice privileging.
Working definition in hand, Bell further delineates common elements of CRT scholarship. He writes:
Critical race theory writing and lecturing is characterized by frequent use of the first person, storytelling, narrative, allegory, interdisciplinary treatment of law, and the unapologetic use of creativity. The work is often disruptive because its commitment to anti-racism goes well beyond civil rights, integration, affirmative action, and other liberal measures. This is not to say that critical race theory adherents automatically or uniformly “trash” liberal ideology and method (as many adherents of critical legal studies do). Rather, they are highly suspicious of the liberal agenda, distrust its method, and want to retain what they see as a valuable strain of egalitarianism which may exist despite, and not because of, liberalism.
Bell associates CRT scholarship with six positive characteristics: (1) uses of the first person, (2) storytelling, (3) narrative, (4) allegory, (5) interdisciplinary treatment of law, and (6) unapologetic use of creativity. He also associates CRT with “negative” characteristics, in the sense that CRT scholarship and scholars advocate forms of anti-racism that go beyond the visions and approaches to civil rights, integration, affirmative action, and other components of modern political liberalism; and CRT scholars are highly suspicious of liberalism’s agenda and methods, despite endorsing its strain of egalitarianism.
Later in section two, Bell extends his characterization of CRT. Citing John Calmore, Bell affirms that CRT scholars “embrace the ideology of antisubordination in some form.” And they “hope that scholarly resistance will lay the groundwork for wide-scale resistance.” One part of this resistance is the concerted effort to challenge the “standards and institutions created by and fortifying white power.” Bell expounds upon this claim by emphasizing a common CRT theme: Decontextualization practices “too often mask unregulated—even unrecognized—power.” Said differently, abstracted argumentation “put forth as ‘rational’ or ‘objective truth,’ smuggles the privileged choice of the privileged to depersonify their claims and then pass them off as the universal authority and the universal good.” Everyone, Bell argues, speaks from what CRT scholar Charles Lawrence calls a “positioned perspective.” We see and act from a biased—i.e., historically and socially situated—perspective. Some of these perspectives “have historically been oppressed, distorted, ignored, silenced, destroyed, appropriated, commodified, and marginalized—and all of this, not accidentally.” And in the US, “the law simultaneously and systematically privileges subjects who are white.” Decontextualized treatments of law and justice, CRT scholars argue, obscure these points while proceeding as if they were neutral, rational, and objective.
Bell notes that CRT scholars situate their emphasis on contextualizing within a robust commitment to egalitarianism. “We seek to empower and include traditionally excluded views and see all-inclusiveness as the ideal because of our belief in collective wisdom.” Here the phrase “all-inclusiveness” is key. Bell argues that CRT scholars like himself are not calling for reverse-domination or the exclusion of all racist or otherwise hierarchical views from public discourse. They are committed to free speech—and recognize that this egalitarian commitment is not neutral. As Bell explains: “Proclaiming that ‘I am committed equally to allowing free speech for the KKK and 2LiveCrew’ is a non-neutral value judgment, one that asserts that the freedom to say hateful things is more important than the freedom to be free from the victimization, stigma, and humiliation that hate speech entails.”
Readers should sense a tension in the common CRT commitments to liberal forms of egalitarianism and race-conscious forms of antisubordination. And they should wonder how this tension manifests in different social spheres (e.g., interpersonal relationships, institutional practices, and societal structures). CRT scholars recognize this tension and, unlike the Critical Legal Studies counterparts, choose to live within and from it rather than accept a rejection of either. Bell quotes CRT scholar Angela Harris making a similar point.
CRT is the heir to both CLS [Critical Legal Studies] and traditional civil rights scholarship. CRT inherits from CLS a commitment to being “critical,” which in this sense means also to be “radical” [while] . . . [a]t the same time, CRT inherits from traditional civil rights scholarship a commitment to a vision of liberation from racism through right reason. Despite the difficulty of separating legal reasoning and institutions from their racist roots, CRT’s ultimate vision is redemptive, not deconstructive.
Harris makes this comment within a discursive frame pitting liberalism’s “modernist” conceptions of rights and emancipation by law against a “postmodernist” conception of deconstruction. This framing is foreign to Bell’s writings. CRT scholar Tommy Curry has shown as much. The difference in discourse and framing reflects the diversity within CRT I discussed elsewhere. CRT scholars inhabit tensions within and without their movement.
Within the liberalism-antisubordination tension, CRT scholars emphasize their marginality to promote transformative resistance. Part of this work, Bell writes, includes “perspective building and concrete advocacy on behalf of those oppressed by race and other interlocking factors of gender, economic class, and sexual orientation.” And this work extends to those who do not recognize their own subordination: “We want to use our perspective as a means of outreach to those similarly situated but who are so caught up in the property perspective of whiteness that they cannot recognize their subordination.”
The previous quotation anticipates a twofold argumentative move Bell makes. First, he argued that a “property perspective in whiteness” affects whites. Bell writes:
Whites in this society seem so willing to accept their own subordination to other whites because of class and social barriers, yet they portray so much hostility toward blacks. The historian, C. Vann Woodward, put the issue well when he wondered how much racism must exist in the bosom of a white man who feels superior to a black while working at a black man’s wages. I have suggested that in this country (which views property ownership as a measure of worth), many whites with relatively little property of the traditional kind-money, securities, and land-see their whiteness as a property right.
Historically, millions of whites have embraced white racial solidarity and the “value” of whiteness even though it caused their economic subordination.
Second, Bell argues that a “property perspective in whiteness” affects Blacks. Bell defends this claim by quoting at length the opening of CRT scholar Cheryl Harris’s essay “Whiteness as Property.” I shall follow suit.
In the 1930s, some years after my mother's family became part of the great river of Black migration that flowed north, my Mississippi-born grandmother was confronted with the harsh matter of economic survival for herself and her two daughters. Having separated from my grandfather, who himself was trapped on the fringes of economic marginality, she took one long hard look at her choices and presented herself for employment at a major retail store in Chicago’s central business district. This decision would have been unremarkable for a white woman in similar circumstances, but for my grandmother, it was an act of both great daring and self-denial, for in so doing she was presenting herself as a white woman. In the parlance of racist America, she was “passing.”
Her fair skin, straight hair, and aquiline features had not spared her from the life of sharecropping into which she had been born in anywhere/nowhere, Mississippi-the outskirts of Yazoo City. But in the burgeoning landscape of urban America, anonymity was possible for a Black person with “white” features. She was transgressing boundaries, crossing borders, spinning on margins, traveling between dualities of Manichean space, rigidly bifurcated into light/dark, good/bad, white/Black. No longer immediately identifiable as “Lula's daughter,” she could thus enter the white world, albeit on a false passport, not merely passing, but trespassing.
Every day my grandmother rose from her bed in her house in a Black enclave on the south side of Chicago, sent her children off to a Black school, boarded a bus full of Black passengers, and rode to work. No one at her job ever asked if she was Black; the question was unthinkable. By virtue of the employment practices of the “fine establishment” in which she worked, she could not have been. Catering to the upper-middle class, understated tastes required that Blacks not be allowed.
She quietly went about her clerical tasks, not once revealing her true identity. She listened to the women with whom she worked discuss their worries-their children's illnesses, their husband’s disappointments, their boyfriends’ infidelities-all of the mundane yet critical things that made up their lives. She came to know them but they did not know her, for my grandmother occupied a completely different place. That place-where white supremacy and economic domination meet-was unknown turf to her white co-workers. They remained oblivious to the worlds within worlds that existed just beyond the edge of their awareness and yet were present in their very midst.
Each evening, my grandmother, tired and worn, retraced her steps home, laid aside her mask, and reentered herself. Day in and day out, she made herself invisible, then visible again, for a price too inconsequential to do more than barely sustain her family and at a cost too precious to conceive. She left the job some years later, finding the strain too much to bear. From time to time, as I later sat with her, she would recollect that period, and the cloud of some painful memory would pass across her face. Her voice would remain subdued, as if to contain the still remembered tension. On rare occasions she would wince, recalling some particularly racist comment made in her presence because of her presumed, shared group affiliation. Whatever retort might have been called for had been suppressed long before it reached her lips, for the price of her family’s wellbeing was her silence. Accepting the risk of self-annihilation was the only way to survive.
Although she never would have stated it this way, the clear and ringing denunciations of racism she delivered from her chair when advanced arthritis had rendered her unable to work were informed by those experiences. The fact that self-denial had been a logical choice and had made her complicit in her own oppression at times fed the fire in her eyes when she confronted some daily outrage inflicted on Black people. Later, these painful memories forged her total identification with the civil rights movement. Learning about the world at her knee as I did, these experiences also came to inform my outlook and my understanding of the world.
Harris offers readers a Black, race-conscious take on passing. Whiteness is valuable. Hence, as Bell writes, “Passing is well known among black people in the United States and is a feature of race subordination in all societies structured on white supremacy.” Bell adds, “Notwithstanding the purported benefits of black heritage in an era of affirmative action, passing is not an obsolete phenomenon that has slipped into history.”
Bell pivots from Harris’s story to a reflection on US law. Noting that Harris’s story “illustrates the valorization of whiteness as treasured in a society structured on racial castes,” Bell says that US law has served to preserve and protect “the set of assumptions, privileges, and benefits that accompany the status of being white.” Bell continues: “Even though law is neither uniform nor explicit in all instances, in protecting settled expectations based on white privileges, American law has recognized a property interest in whiteness that, although unacknowledged, now forms the background against which legal disputes are framed, argued, and adjudicated.” One can hear President Clinton and Senator Biden and the words of the 1994 Crime Bill in the background.
Bell also hears CRT’s critics. He hears Kennedy, Farber, and Sherry chiding him for talking about non-white voices and perspectives. He hears them rebuking CRT scholars for being inaccurate, atypical, non-analytic, and overall deficient. Thus, Bell hears them saying what CRT ought to be: more universal, more white.
Bell starts his rejoinder by noting that those claiming a voice of color does not exist ignore the “centuries of testimony by people of color regarding their experiences, including individuals like Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Wright, and Toni Morrison.” Bell is chiding these scholars for not knowing Black traditions and Black authors who spoke in race-conscious, white-gaze defying voices.
Then Bell turns to Kennedy. I quote Bell at length.
Kennedy adds to his critique by severely criticizing critical race theory’s race-conscious perspective. When a black scholar at a prominent law school tells anyone who will listen that other folks of color are deluded about being excluded on the basis of their race; when a black scholar argues against race-conscious legal remedies or hiring policies; when a black scholar contends that there is no hidden “white” normativity or perspective but rather a meritocratic normativity (the companion claim to the claim that there is no minority perspective); when a black scholar says these things, all who rarely listen to scholars of color sit up and take notice. And take notes. And turn those notes into more fuel for the legitimacy debate that has always attended renegade movements. And critical race theory is renegade in the best sense of the word. Having drawn on the experience of the failed Second Reconstruction, how ironic and scary it is that the twentieth century draws to a close with racial hostility in full cry just as it was at the end of the nineteenth century.
At a time of crisis, critics serve as reminders that we are being heard, if not always appreciated.
Bell has contextualized Kennedy’s rejection of CRT and that rejection’s national reception. Moreover, Bell’s race-conscious contextualization implicitly links Kennedy’s essay with The Bell Curve. Both spread falsehoods that uphold practices of racial subordination. And, for Bell, Kennedy’s text is the more nefarious because white readers want to hear black people deny racial subordination, particularly during times of crisis and racial hostility. This is how enhanced racial standing works.
Section Three: Spirituals
Bell extends his rejoinder by considering the Spirituals of African slaves. Slaves could sing; Slave Codes did not forbid this practice. And slaves used their songs for many purposes: “giving warning, conveying information about escapes planned and carried out, and simply for uplifting the spirit and fortifying the soul.” Of course, these songs, these Spirituals, were also “a theology in song, a new interpretation of Christianity, one far closer to the original than that practiced by those who hoped the Bible would serve as a tool of pacification, not enlightenment.” Growing up in a family committed to the AME Church, Bell learned many of these Spirituals and the form of Christianity they carried when he was young.
Bell also learned that many whites historically had deemed the Spirituals bad art. He discusses this point within one of his patented instances of “imagining.”
At some point, white scholars must have heard the Spirituals. It is easy to imagine their reaction. Even the most hostile would have had to admit that the sometimes joyous and often plaintive melodies had a surface attraction. The scholars would have concluded, though, that the basically primitive song-chants were not capable of complex development and were certainly too simplistic to convey sophisticated musical ideas. The music, moreover, was not in classical form, likely deemed a fatal defect. Indeed, the slave songs were not even written down by those unknown persons who had composed them. Surely, these simple melodies could not be compared with the lieder of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, or Brahms.
Whatever they were, the critics would conclude, these songs were not art. There was no potential in the music for intellectual inspiration as opposed to purely emotional satisfaction. Of course, the critics might concede, in the hands of classically trained composers and musicians, the Spirituals might serve as folk melodies from which true art might be rendered. Stephen Foster was said to have done this, and later Antonin Dvorak, and still later, George Gershwin. Many others followed. A few of them credited the genius in the slave songs, but most simply took what they wanted and called it their own without acknowledgement of the sources that, when asked, they deprecated and denied.
Foster, Dvorak, and Gershwin—each appropriated African Spirituals, African voices, to make “true” art. In the process, they decontextualized the songs, severed them from their communally informed original functions. How else could they participate within white art?
Section Four: Spirituals and CRT
The original audience and future readers should have understood why Bell discussed the Spirituals when defending CRT. But, in case they did not, Bell became explicit.
Comparing critical race theory writing with the Spirituals is an unjustified conceit, but the essence of both is quite similar: to communicate understanding and reassurance to needy souls trapped in a hostile world. Moreover, the use of unorthodox structure, language, and form to make sense of the senseless is another similarity. Quite predictably, critics wedded to the existing legal canons will critique critical race theory, and the comparable work by feminists, with their standards of excellence and find this new work seriously inadequate. Many of these critics are steeped in theory and deathly afraid of experience. They seek meaning by dissecting portions of this writing-the autobiographical quality of some work, and the allegorical, story-telling characteristic in others. But all such criticisms miss the point. Critical race theory cannot be understood by claiming that it is intended to make critical race studies writing more accessible and more effective in conveying arguments of discrimination and disadvantage to the majority.
For Bell, CRT stands in the hallowed tradition of Black resistance and remediation. It aims to nourish those suffering from racial subordination. And it comes in a register and form that, though foreign and grotesque to those bound to the property perspective of whiteness, rings as a powerful counter to those suffering under the racist weight of The Bell Curve and the racist policies championed and enacted by Presidents and Senators.
Intermission
This post is long. It needed to be. How else could it serve as an artifact of resistance to the flurry of shoddy “CRT” discourses swirling throughout the US? How else could it be a counter to the emaciated tweets, blog posts, and articles on “CRT”? You’ll be hard pressed to find a single sustained reflection on a single CRT text. This truth should embarrass many. It’s unlikely to embarrass even a few.
Within this long post, I have discussed the historical context for Derrick Bell’s essay “Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory?”. I have also offered a close reading of this text, noting its structure, principal themes, and some of its shortcomings. Throughout, I have tried to offer an exposition that echoes Bell. But I have not endorsed his presentation of CRT as the right take on CRT. And I have not tried to offer thorough defenses of Bell’s claims. I make these points to minimize the likelihood that people misread and misrepresent this post.
More to come.
Saludos y’all.
