Thursday, Sept. 3, 2015
Introduction to Critical Race Theory
Who’s White?
• Source: Linda Gordon, “Who’s White?” New
York Times, 25 March 2010
• 18th-century German scholars invented racial
“science.” SCIENCE!
• Dutchman Petrus Camper calculated the
proportions and angles of the ideal face and skull,
and produced a scale that awarded a perfect
rating to the head of a Greek god and ranked
Europeans as the runners-up, earning 80 out of
100
• Englishman Charles White collected skulls that he
arranged from lowest to highest degree of
perfection.
• The modern concept of a “Caucasian” race
came from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach of
Göttingen (1752-1840). Switching from skulls
to skin, he divided humans into five races by
color — white, yellow, copper, tawny, and
tawny-black to jet-black — but he ascribed
these differences to climate. Influential to
founders of U.S. like Thomas Jefferson.
Eugenics — the practice of breeding humans to
produce desired characteristics. Thirty U.S.
states passed laws that encouraged such
practices, like forced sterilization of the mentally
ill. Especially targeted towards people of color.
In 1965, 30% of the women in Puerto Rico (a
U.S. commonwealth) had been sterilized
through public health policies created by the
U.S.
• Laws against miscegenation (sexual mixing
between races) – overturned in 1967 Virginia
v. Loving
• 1922 Cable Act – women were finally allowed
their own citizenship status; no longer
dependent upon husband’s automatically
Who was considered white?
•
•
•
•
Nordic peoples, the English (NOT the Irish)
Eventually, Germans and some others…
Religion-based: Catholics & Jews not white
Italians, Jews, Irish NOT considered white
during the periods in which they immigrated
(mid-19th to early 20th c.)
• When and how did they become “obviously”
white people?
Case Study: the United States
• Citizenship tied to race; race tied to citizenship
Case Study: the United States
• Citizenship tied to race; race tied to citizenship
• Naturalization Act of 1790 (jus soli or jus
sanguinis) – free whites (men)
Case Study: the United States
• Citizenship tied to race; race tied to citizenship
• Naturalization Act of 1790 (jus soli or jus
sanguinis) – free whites (men)
• 1870 – persons of African nativity or descent
Case Study: the United States
• Citizenship tied to race; race tied to citizenship
• Naturalization Act of 1790 (jus soli or jus
sanguinis) – free whites (men)
• 1870 – persons of African nativity or descent
• Petition to be white (why not black?)
Case Study: the United States
• Citizenship tied to race; race tied to citizenship
• Naturalization Act of 1790 (jus soli or jus
sanguinis) – free whites (men)
• 1870 – persons of African nativity or descent
• Petition to be white (why not black?)
• Rationale: legal precedent, scientific evidence,
or common sense
Racial Prerequisite Cases
• List of cases:
http://academic.udayton.edu/race/01race/W
hite05.htm
For more, see Ian Haney Lopez’s book White By
Law: The Legal Construction of Race
Other racially restrictive laws
• These laws also helped shape the idea that
America was a “white”country:
• 1875 Page Act
• 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act
• Alien Land Laws (limited who can own
property to those eligible for citizenship)
• Johnson-Reed Act (1924) – national origin
quotas (no Asians allowed)
Origins of Critical Race Theory
• Also influenced by Cultural Studies approach:
how do we know what we know?
• 1970’s and 80’s: students and scholars
frustrated with the Civil Rights Movement –
too slow, not enough being done (reliance on
changing the law to produce equality)
• Began to question how the law may actually
be producing and sustaining inequality
What is Critical Race Theory?
• Note use of the word “critical”
What is Critical Race Theory?
• Note use of the word “critical”
• Other forms of “race theory”: phrenology,
eugenics, biological determinism([all
“science”-based), racial hygiene (“purity”)
Keywords for Critical Race Theory
• Race, racism, racialized, racialization, racial
formation, white, whiteness, white privilege,
white supremacy, black, blackness, Latino/a,
Asian, Asian American, Native American,
indigenous, First Peoples, Arab, Muslim,
mestizo, hapa, mixed-race, people of color,
structure, liberalism, capitalism, capital,
identity, embodiment, material, the body,
minoritized, minoritization
Key Questions for CRT
• What is race? How race is constituted legally,
culturally, socially, economically, etc?
Key Questions for CRT
• What is race? How race is constituted legally,
culturally, socially, economically, etc?
• What are the origins and implications of the
way we think about race?
Key Questions for CRT
• What is race? How race is constituted legally,
culturally, socially, economically, etc?
• What are the origins and implications of the
way we think about race?
• How does “race” mean different things in
different contexts, times, and places?
Key Questions for CRT
• What is race? How race is constituted legally,
culturally, socially, economically, etc?
• What are the origins and implications of the
way we think about race?
• How does “race” mean different things in
different contexts, times, and places?
• How does race interact with other forms of
identity and embodiment?
Key Questions for CRT
• What is race? How race is constituted legally,
culturally, socially, economically, etc?
• What are the origins and implications of the way
we think about race?
• How does “race” mean different things in
different contexts, times, and places?
• How does race interact with other forms of
identity and embodiment?
• What creates the conditions for inequality?
Axioms (starting points)
• Racism is not an event (or a feeling), it’s a
structure. (Ex. Incident vs. environment)
--How some people see racism: an incident in
which someone says something racist.
--How racism is experienced: a
system/environment in which I am vulnerable to
racism.
Axioms (starting points)
• Racism is not an event (or a feeling), it’s a
structure. (Ex. Incident vs. environment)
• Race is not biological; it is socially constructed,
yet it is real (it is a fiction with material
consequences).
Axioms (starting points)
• Racism is not an event (or a feeling), it’s a
structure.
• Race is not biological; it is socially constructed,
yet it is real (it is a fiction with material
consequences).
• Whiteness as a form of property (the students
in the doc who said “something was being
taken away”; whites earn higher wages;
people have petitioned to be white, etc.)
Axioms (starting points)
• Racism is not an event (or a feeling), it’s a
structure.
• Race is not biological; it is socially constructed,
yet it is real (race is a fiction with material
consequences).
• Whiteness as a form of property
• Race is “intersectional” – i.e., we can’t think
about race without also thinking about gender,
sexuality, class. To be “Asian” means something
different if you’re a man or a woman; gay or
straight, rich or poor, etc.
Why ask these q’s? What’s at stake?
• Social justice. Outcomes for health, wealth,
academic achievement, upward mobility, all
indexed by race (and class, too).
Why ask these q’s? What’s at stake?
• Social justice. Outcomes for health, wealth,
academic achievement, upward mobility, all
indexed by race (and class, too).
• Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as “the
state-sanctioned or extra-legal production and
exploitation of group-differentiated
vulnerability to premature death” (Golden
Gulag 28). [race is the production of
differential outcomes]
Bottom Line
• Race appears to be a natural, “obvious”
phenomenon, but it is not. Race is more than just
ocular (i.e., what you see on the surface).
• Race means different things in different places
and times
• Brazil: brancos (white), pardos (brown), pretos
(black), amarelos (yellow), indigenous [vs. UK, China]
• Across time: “Oriental,” “Asian,” “n*gger,”
“Negro,” “colored,” “African American,” “black”
• “people of color”
Solutions?
Rather than ignoring difference from whiteness,
understand difference within humans and
human history.
Knowing LESS about something is never the
solution.