Critical Race Theory
Editor(s)
Kathleen Odell Korgen
Files
Description
Numerous sociologists engaged in interdisciplinary critical studies on race have embraced the writings emerging from critical race theory (CRT). These race scholars reject the traditional emphasis on assimilation or separating communities as ethnic or racial but rather recognize race “as a mode of constructing political communities” (Jung 2009: 390) and challenge discourses on a “post-racial” era of “color-blindness” and meritocracy. Critical race scholars focus on power relations and domination central in maintaining boundaries of national belonging and critique scholarship on multiculturalism and diversity, which emphasizes integration and assimilation.
Legal scholar Derrick Bell forged the path for CRT in his powerful narratives, such as And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (Bell 1987) and Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (Bell 1992). Bell's use of personal narrative, critique of white supremacy, and commitment to an activist agenda, were ideal for teaching and researching the way that race is embedded in our social institutions and is reinforced and maintained through everyday practices. Weaving legal scholarship and the struggle for social justice, Bell's writings attracted race scholars in sociology who recognized that the study of race has never been neutral but has always involved issues of power, inequality, and oppression. CRT “rejects the prevailing orthodoxy that scholarship should be or could be ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’” to pursue “engaged, even adversarial, scholarship” (Crenshaw 1995:xiii). In locating CRT in sociology today, we begin with a brief overview of CRT and its key themes. We then discuss the contributions of the founder of the sociology of race, W. E. B. Du Bois, to CRT, sociological perspectives that utilize CRT, and the works of some sociologists who have incorporated CRT into their research.
Title of Book
The Cambridge Handbook of Sociology Volume 2: Specialty and Interdisciplinary Studies
ISBN
9781316418369
Publication Date
2017
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
City
Cambridge
Recommended Citation
Mary Romero & Jeremiah Chin,
Critical Race Theory, in
The Cambridge Handbook of Sociology Volume 2: Specialty and Interdisciplinary Studies
30
(Kathleen Odell Korgen eds., 2017).
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/faculty-chapters/62