Classical liberal ideals such as meritocracy, equal opportunity, and colorblind justice, they said, actually served the white elite by cloaking and reinforcing society’s deep structural inequalities. Racism, according to this line of thought, is not a matter of bad behavior by individual racists; it’s embedded in American attitudes and institutions. Even with overt discrimination outlawed, institutional racism and unconscious biases—sometimes expressed through accidental slights, as when a white person praises a black person as “clean” and “articulate”—would keep minorities down. Derrick Bell and other legal scholars began using the phrase “critical race theory” in the 1970s as a takeoff on “critical legal theory,” a branch of legal scholarship that challenges the validity of concepts such as rationality, objective truth, and judicial neutrality. Critical legal theory was itself a takeoff on critical theory, a philosophical framework with roots in Marxist thought. Bell in particular advanced what he called “interest convergence theory,” which holds that whites will support minority rights only when it’s in their interest as well. For example, he saw the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 school-desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education, as a part of a Cold War effort to improve America’s standing among Third World countries. To redress racial wrongs, he sympathized with black nationalists’ calls for separate black institutions but also pushed for affirmative action at Harvard and elsewhere.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Dec 2014 21:42:48 +0000