Tagged: CRT

“Race is a social construction, not a biological reality. Hence we may unmake it and deprive it of much of its sting by changing the system of images, words, attitudes, unconscious feelings, scripts, and social teachings by which we convey to one another that certain people are less intelligent, reliable, hardworking, virtuous, and American than others.”

The more than I think about melanin, the more I believe that “race” is a biological reality…

Source: Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. pg. 17. 2001.

“Critical race theory sprang up in the mid-1970s, as a number of lawyers, activists, and legal scholars across the country realized, more or less simultaneously, that the heady advances of the civil rights era of the 1960s had stalled and, in many respects, were being rolled back. Realizing that new theories and strategies were needed to combat the subtler forms of racism that were gaining ground, early writers such as Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, and Richard Delgado put their minds to the task. They were soon joined by others, and the group held its first conference at a convent outside Madison, Wisconsin, in the summer of 1989. Further conferences and meetings took place. Some were closed working sessions at which the group threshed out internal problems and struggled to clarify central issues, which others were public, multi-day affairs with panels, plenary sessions, keynote speakers, and a broad representation of students, activists, and scholars from a wide variety of disciplines.”

Source: Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. pg. 3-4. 2001.

“Nationalists are apt to describe themselves as a nation within a nation and to hold that the loyalty and identification of black people, for example, should lie with that community and only secondarily with the United States.”

Source: Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. pg. 62. 2001.

“When we are tackling a structure as deeply embedded as race, radical measures are required. ‘Everything must change at once,’ otherwise the system merely swallows the small improvement one has made, and everything remains the same.”

Source: Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. pg. 56. 2001.

“[O]ur system applauds affording everyone equality of opportunity, but resists programs that assure equality of results.”

Source: Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. pg. 23. 2001.

“[T]he voice-of-color thesis holds that because of their different histories and experiences with oppression, black, Indian, Asian, and Latino/a writers and thinkers may be able to communicate to their white counterparts matters that whites are unlikely to know. Minority status, in other words, brings with it a presumed competence to speak about race and racism.”

Source: Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. pg. 9. 2001.

“Unlike some academic disciplines, critical race theory contains an activist dimension. It not only tries to understand our social situation, but to chance it; it sets out not only to ascertain how society organizes itself along racial lines and hierarchies, but to transform it for the better.”

Source: Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. pg. 3. 2001.

“Critical race theory not only dares to treat race as central to the law and policy of the United States, it dares to look beyond the popular belief that getting rid of racism means simply getting rid of ignorance, or encouraging everyone to ‘get along.'”

Source: Foreword by Angela Harris. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. pg. xx. 2001.