Critical Race Theory

Dr Cornell West describes Critical Race Theory as ‘an intellectual movement that is both particular to our postmodern (and conservative) times and part of a long tradition of human resistance and liberation.’ (Crenshaw, Gotanda, and Peller 1995).

‘Critical Race Theory sprang up in the mid-1970s with the early work of Derrick Bell (an African American) and Alan Freeman (a white), both of whom were deeply distressed over the slow pace of racial reform in the United States. It seemed to them—and they were quickly joined by others—that the civil rights movement of the 1960s had stalled, and indeed that many of its gains were being rolled back. New approaches were needed to understand and come to grips with the more subtle, but just as deeply entrenched, varieties of racism that chacacterized our times.’ (Delgado and Stefancic 2013).

‘[Critical Race Theory] claims that ‘[…] racism is normal, not aberrant, in American society. Because racism is an ingrained feature of our landscape, it looks ordinary and naturel to persons in the culture. Formal equal opportunity—rules and laws that insist on treating blacks and whites (for example) alike—can thus remedy only the more extreme and shocking forms of injustice […]. It can do little about the business-as-usual forms of racism that people of color confront every day and that account for much misery, alienation, and despair.’ (Delgado and Stefancic 2013).

Derrick Bell states that CRT ‘holds that white elites will tolerate or encourage racial advances for blacks only when such advances also promote self-interest. Other critics question whether civil rights law is designed to benefit folks of color, even suggest that it is really a homeostatic mechanism that ensures that racial progress occurs at just the right pace: Change that is too rapid would be unsettling to society at large; that which is too slow could prove destabilizing.’ (Delgado and Stefancic 2013).

For the discipline of IR, Critical Race Theory poses some unconformable questions as IR as a discipline was founded from an exclusive and white view from the global north. Scholars in history, philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, comparative literature, media studies, feminist theory and even linguistics ‘[…] have taken the question of race more seriously than IR and have generated an immense body of work – often multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary – that tackles the construct and problematique of race in diverse and exciting ways. For example, scholars have undertaken genealogies of racism [….] highlighting the workings of white supremacy as a cohesive political system of thought conceptually on par with other ‘isms’ like liberalism and fascism […] as well as in the formation of class consciousness. For example, we would suggest that not only is the emergence of the nation-state, and capitalist modernity as a project more generally, inextricably linked to racial logics, the very persistence of these logic is evident in contemporary liberal humanitarian intervention, national-building and modern forms of slavery and trafficking.’ (Anievas, Manchandad and Shilliam 2015).

‘Though questions of race and racism have been often side-lined to the margins of contemporary IR, such issues were in fact integral to the birth of the discipline. IR was founded, in large part, as a policy science designed to solve the dilemmas posed by empire-building and colonial administration facing the white Western powers expanding into and occupying the so-called ‘waste places of the earth’, a the Global South was commonly referred to by contemporaries. […] Thus, within the Anglo-saxon nations, and particularly the US and UK, the field of IR took flight around such issues as empire and imperialism and inter racial relations. […]’ (Anievas, Manchanda and Shilliam 2015).

The importance of Critical Race Theory and the issue of race and ethnicity are within CRT’s field of interest, and particularly how racism is institutional, international (global) and are linked to power—key elements that IR aims to understand. Ocloo states that ‘The claim that racism is nothing more than ideological is confusing or delimiting in a different way. It misleadingly leaves the deleterious effects of racist practices and institutions to be captured by some other term like racialism or racist discrimination. Alternatively, by insisting that the raison d’être of the racist ideological structure is to hide some underlying form of economic, social, or political oppression, this widely shared claim refuses to acknowledge the materiality of racially defined effects in their own right. It fails to acknowledge, and so leaves unexplained, the fact that racist expressions may at times define and promote rather than merely rationalize social arrangements and institutions’ (Ocloo 2001).

Even more, it has been argued that Western civilization has been built on racism. ‘[it] has always flourished as part and parcel of a system of power. Europeans did not encounter other cultures as tourists or disinterested scientific investigators. Racism arose not simply to explain difference but to justify conquest, colonization, enslavement, and economic domination’ (Marcuse, 1991).