Race Marxism by Lindsay James

Author:Lindsay, James
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9798795809083
Publisher: New Discourses
Published: 2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

And that’s exactly how Critical Race Theory emerged from Critical Legal Studies (and exactly how it takes over everything). It came in, got involved, and then said, in effect, “you’re not centering race in your analyses of power; this is probably because you are racists who can’t—or worse, won’t—even realize you’re racist.” And it worked. And it still works. Here’s how they describe it in their own words, which reek of Black Feminist identity politicking:

At its inception in the late 70s, Critical Legal Studies (CLS) was basically a white and largely male academic organization. By the mid-eighties, there was a small cadre of scholars of color who frequented CLS conferences and summer camps. Most were generally conversant with Critical Legal Theory and sympathetic to the progressive sensibilities of Critical Legal Studies as a whole. Unlike the law school mainstream, this cadre was far from deterred by CLS critique of liberal legalism. While many in the legal community were, to put it mildly, deeply disturbed by the CLS assault against such ideological mainstays as the rule of the law, to scholars of color who drew on a history of colored communities’ struggle against formal and institutional racism, the crits’ contention that law was neither apolitical, neutral, nor determinate hardly seemed controversial. Indeed, we believed that this critical perspective formed the basic building blocks of any serious attempt to understand the relationship between law and white supremacy. However, while the emerging “race crits” shared this starting position with CLS, significant differences between us became increasingly apparent during a series of conferences in the mid-eighties.

Our discussions during the conferences revealed that while we shared with crits the belief that legal consciousness functioned to legitimize social power in the United States, race crits also understood that race and racism likewise functioned as central pillars of hegemonic power. Because CLS scholars had not, by and large, developed and incorporated a critique of racial power into their analysis, their practices, politics and theories regarding race tended to be unsatisfying and sometimes indistinguishable from those of the dominant institutions they were otherwise contesting. As race moved from the margins to the center of discourse within Critical Legal Studies—or, as some would say, Critical Legal Studies took the race turn—institutional and theoretical disjunctures between critical legal studies and the emerging scholarship on race eventually manifested themselves as central themes within Critical Race Theory.166

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