Why is it called “Critical Race Theory”?

“If it’s not a single theory, why is it called ‘Critical Race Theory?’” I get this question all the time.

If you’ve had the same question, the following remarks by Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of CRT’s founders, are for you. Enjoy!

Having participated in the FemCrits’ West Coast meetings, I had been thinking about how useful it had been to organize our work around the framework of “feminist legal theory” rather than the considerably narrower category of “sex-discrimination law.” Feminist legal theory laid claim to a broader undertaking than a mere study of rules governing sex discrimination: Contained within the broader feminist concept was the project of unpacking law’s relationship to gender. What would be the parallel concept for critical scholars of color seeking to lay claim to the broader study of law's relationship to race? What was to civil rights what feminist legal theory was to sex discrimination law?

Turning this question over, I began to scribble down words associated with our objectives, identities, and perspectives, drawing arrows and boxes around them to capture various aspects of who “we” were and what we were doing. The list included: progressive/critical, CLS, race, civil rights, racism, law, jurisprudence, theory, doctrine, and so on. Mixing them up and throwing them together in various combinations, one proposed combination came together in a way that seemed to capture the possibility we were aiming to create. Sometime toward the end of the interminable winter of 1989, we settled on what seemed to be the most telling marker for this peculiar subject. We would signify the specific political and intellectual location of the project through “critical,” the substantive focus through “race,” and the desire to develop a coherent account of race and law through the term “theory.”

But the work wasn't quite done yet. Was this an independent thing or merely a descriptive or generic term? Should we capitalize it or leave it as two modifiers and a noun? We decided to go for broke. If we were going to give this inchoate thing a name, let it be a proper sign on the intellectual landscape: Critical Race Theory. (I had this preoccupation at the time about the politics of proper nouns, having just won a battle with the Harvard Law Review about capitalizing “Black” when used as a racial identifier.) So the name Critical Race Theory, now used as interchangeably for race scholarship as Kleenex is used for tissue, was basically made up, fused together to mark a possibility.

It was far from clear at the time whether the name would stick, and there were discussions at the first workshop about what, if anything, the name actually meant. In fact, participants at the first workshop kicked around several other possibilities, including the idea of calling our project “Reconstruction Theory.” It so happened, however, that a new periodical edited by Randall Kennedy was called Reconstruction, and concerns about the potential confusion generated by two similarly named projects with very different ideological premises may have contributed to the somewhat greater appeal of the name “Critical Race Theory.” In any case, the name stuck.

The task remained to define it.