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The history of critical race theory and humanities classrooms
Although its philosophical roots date back far further, to the 1960s and '70s, the idea behind it goes to the work of civil rights activists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Fannie Lou Hamer and Pauli Murray. However, Critical race theory (CRT) was formally structured in 1989, during the first annual Workshop on Critical Race Theory. The critical legal studies (CLS) movement, which devoted itself to analyzing how the law and legal institutions serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the weak and disadvantaged, was its direct forerunner. (CLS, a branch of Marxist-oriented critical theory, may also be seen as a radicalization of early 20th-century legal realism, a school of legal philosophy that holds that judicial decision-making, especially at the appellate level, is influenced by nonlegal—political or ideological—factors as much as by precedent and rules of legal reasoning.) (Martinez 2014)
Despite legislation and court decisions advancing civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, critical race theorists held that political liberalism was unable to adequately address fundamental issues of injustice in American society because its emphasis on the equitable treatment under the law of all races ("color blindness") left it unable to recognize practices that were less overt or subtle, such as those that were relative to a person's race. Liberal thought was also criticized for erroneously assuming that judicial decisions were apolitical and for adopting a self-aware incremental or reformist strategy that prolonged unjust social structures and provided opportunities for retreat and backsliding via administrative delays and conservative legal challenges (Martinez 2012).
Critical racial theorists, in contrast to the majority of CLS researchers, did not want to completely reject the idea of law or legal rights because, in their opinion, some laws and legal reforms had greatly aided those who were oppressed or exploited (Martinez 2014).
Work Cited:
Martinez, Aja. “Critical Race Theory: Its Origins, History, and Importance to the Discourses and Rhetorics of Race.” Experts@Syracuse, 1 Jan. 2014, Vol. 27.2 Frame-Journal of Literacy Studies https://experts.syr.edu/en/publications/critical-race-theory-its-origins-history-and-importance-to-the-di.
Lastly, race is socially manufactured rather than naturally occurring. In the latter half of the 20th century, genetic research finally disproved the biogenetic notion of race, which held that the human species is subdivided into various groups based on inherited physical and behavioral distinctions. Scholars from the social sciences, history, and other disciplines concur that race is a social construction (though there is no consensus regarding what exactly a social construction is or what the process of social construction consists of) (Martinez 2014).
According to some proponents of the CRT theory, race is a made-up correlation between a group of physical traits, such as skin tone, certain facial features, and hair texture, and a hypothetical set of psychological and behavioral proclivities, defined as either positive or negative, good or terrible. In the United States, white people of western European origin have founded and maintained the associations in order to legitimize their exploitation and oppression of other groups on the grounds of the latter's alleged inferiority, immorality, or lack of capacity for self-rule (Martinez 2014).
The majority of people of color experience racism as part of daily life in the United States, not as an exception. The majority of people of color continue to experience routine discrimination or other unfair treatment in both public and private spheres, despite the fact that extreme racism is less prevalent among whites than it was before the middle of the 20th century, and explicitly racist laws and legal practices—epitomized by the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation and denied basic civil rights to African Americans in the South—have largely been eliminated (Martinez 2014).
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