They interviewed adherents and critics alike. But it is obvious whose side they are on:
Taunya Lovell Banks, a law professor at the University of Maryland, was traveling by train to Baltimore a few years ago when a man exposed himself to her and then ran into the next car.
Professor Banks and the conductor discussed what to do, including whether to have the man arrested. The conductor suggested just letting him off at the next stop. And that set Professor Banks to thinking about the circumstances.
She and the man were black; the conductor was white. Would the conductor have treated the matter differently had she been white? What if the conductor had been black? And was the man mentally disturbed because, as a black man, society had pressed him too hard and provided too little help?
An ordinary observer might have regarded what occurred on the train as a relatively simple incident. But Professor Banks is an adherent of a growing academic movement among minority scholars called critical race theory, which holds that peoples perspectives on events are overwhelmingly determined by their racial background. For critical race theorists, such incidents are rarely straightforward or what they might seem to others.
Critical race theorists, who are on the faculty at almost every major law school and are producing an ever-growing body of scholarly work, have drawn from an idea made popular by postmodernist scholars of all races, that there is no objective reality.
Originating in the nations law schools, critical race theory has spread far beyond those institutions to become a significant new front in the nations increasingly fractious culture wars. Supporters and opponents agree that it has a clear and obvious bearing on familiar issues like the legitimacy of ebonics and Afrocentric curriculums, the guilt or innocence of O. J. Simpson and the fairness of affirmative action helping to explain how whites and blacks can find themselves quivering with exasperation at each others view on those issues.
Perhaps most significantly, critical race theory is providing an intellectual foundation for newly flourishing forms of black separateness.
While they do not disapprove of integration that occurs naturally, critical race theorists reject the classic liberal view of integration as the ultimate goal. They deride the concept of a colorblind society.
Critical race theory counters colorblindness by saying that race is not simply skin color, and it tries to reveal the ways that race is a category that has been structured out of law and culture and history, said Prof. Kimberle Crenshaw of the University of California at Los Angeles Law School, an editor of the leading anthology on the subject.
Most people think law is being neutral if it doesnt say anything explicit about race, she said. But it is not usually neutral. It is simply facilitating whatever power relationships were in existence when the law was put in place. One important battleground in critical race theory is the criminal justice system: Why, the theorists ask, are a disproportionate number of the men in Americas jails black? Many critical race theorists say it is because the system is infected with racism at every level, from prosecutors offices to judges chambers.
Some of the nontraditional proposals made by minority law professors startle, and even anger, some of their white colleagues. Prof. Paul Butler of the George Washington University Law School has gone so far as to suggest that blacks, usually a majority on urban juries, should exercise their power to acquit black defendants in nonviolent drug crimes.
Professor Butler, a former Federal prosecutor, has also suggested that black jurors should assess whether black Americans would be helped or harmed by acquitting black defendants accused of stealing the property of whites. He has portrayed his suggestions as a kind of black self-help, a direct way of adjusting the score after decades of racial oppression.
Critics of critical race theory, like Prof. Suzanna Sherry of the University of Minnesota law school, contend that it defies common sense and abandons intellectual principles in an effort to promote the political standing of blacks in society.
Professor Sherry, a co-author of Beyond All Reason (Oxford University Press), a forthcoming book that challenges critical race theory, suggested in an interview that the movement was the result of increasing frustration among black intellectuals over the failure to eradicate racism.
The problem with denying any objective reality, she said, is that there is no way of mediating among the competing perceptions of reality except power. And what they ultimately want is more power for their perceptions.
Many critical race theorists say an important tool for members of minorities in overcoming their disadvantages is to tell stories, some of them from individual experience and some of them parables. Storytelling, Professor Crenshaw said, aims at challenging versions of reality put forward by the dominant white culture.
Black men, for example, may tell stories about police brutality that are at odds with the official version of how common such behavior is. By putting forward an anecdotal version of reality, Professor Crenshaw said, the men assert the primacy of personal experience and no matter what society tells them, they trust their own personal experiences.
Some critical race scholars also construct elaborate fables to illustrate their points. Their books typically eschew evidence to make a point, relying instead on fictionalized tales or dialogue.
But for Professor Sherry, storytelling doesnt bear the slightest pressure once you start to examine it. Such storytelling, she said, starts with conclusions, and when you start with conclusions, its all too easy to make arguments that wont withstand any scrutiny. Her co-author and colleague at the University of Minnesota, Daniel A. Farber, who, like Professor Sherry, is white, said another problem with storytelling, especially personal narratives like the one by Professor Banks, is that when someone challenges a story, youre not just criticizing someones scholarship, but youre attacking their life, something that goes to the heart of their identity. Dr. Farber added, That can make a dialogue very difficult. In defense of storytelling, Prof. Alex M. Johnson Jr. of the University of Virginia has written that minority scholars have a distinct voice of color, which rejects narrow evidentiary concepts of relevance and credibility.
Some theorists go so far as to say that what really happened in a particular incident may be no more important than what people feel or say happened. For example, some argue that even though Tawana Brawley, then a teen-ager, made up her account that a gang of white men, one with a badge, raped and defiled her in New York in 1987, her story is still valid because it offers truths about the oppression of black women.
In her book The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Harvard, 1991), Prof. Patricia Williams of the Columbia University Law School appeared to suggest that it made little difference whether Ms. Brawley had made up her account. The teen-ager, Professor Williams wrote, was the victim of an unspeakable crime no matter who did it to her and even if she did it to herself.
Her condition was clearly the expression of some crime against her, some tremendous violence, some great violation that challenges comprehension, Professor Williams said. Tawanas terrible story has every black womans worst fears and experiences wrapped into it.
Critics of Professor Williamss comments, however, note that a New York State grand jury investigated Ms. Brawleys story and concluded that she had made it up. Professor Williams, Professor Sherry wrote, seems unable to distinguish between Brawleys fantasized rape and another womans real one.
In a recent interview, Professor Williams said she had been misinterpreted. She meant, she said, that the debate about whether Ms. Brawley was telling the truth obscured that she was a troubled minor.
Her needs were not dealt with, as they should have been with any child, Professor Williams said. Further, Ms. Brawley was transformed into a stereotype of black women as hard women who can never really suffer any violation, she added.
Professor Cook, of Georgetown, the author of a book about race and religion called The Least of These (Routledge, 1997), put it a different way. Even if Ms. Brawley made up her story, he said, it was meaningful because it accurately represented black womens collective fear of racial and sexual mistreatment, a fear reinforced by centuries of domination and subjugation.
Then what about the stories told by Susan Smith in South Carolina and Charles Stuart in Boston, whites who falsely blamed black men for horrific crimes they had committed themselves? Dont they tell the story, say, of white fear of black crime?
Professor Cook said that the Stuart and Smith events were far less valid than Ms. Brawleys because hers represents a story from an oppressed class.
Tawanas terrible story has every black womans worst fears and experiences wrapped into it.
Critics of Professor Williamss comments, however, note that a New York State grand jury investigated Ms. Brawleys story and concluded that she had made it up. Professor Williams, Professor Sherry wrote, seems unable to distinguish between Brawleys fantasized rape and another womans real one.
In a recent interview, Professor Williams said she had been misinterpreted. She meant, she said, that the debate about whether Ms. Brawley was telling the truth obscured that she was a troubled minor.
Her needs were not dealt with, as they should have been with any child, Professor Williams said. Further, Ms. Brawley was transformed into a stereotype of black women as hard women who can never really suffer any violation, she added.
Professor Cook, of Georgetown, the author of a book about race and religion called The Least of These (Routledge, 1997), put it a different way. Even if Ms. Brawley made up her story, he said, it was meaningful because it accurately represented black womens collective fear of racial and sexual mistreatment, a fear reinforced by centuries of domination and subjugation.
Then what about the stories told by Susan Smith in South Carolina and Charles Stuart in Boston, whites who falsely blamed black men for horrific crimes they had committed themselves? Dont they tell the story, say, of white fear of black crime?
Professor Cook said that the Stuart and Smith events were far less valid than Ms. Brawleys because hers represents a story from an oppressed class.
Professor Butler, a former Federal prosecutor, has also suggested that black jurors should assess whether black Americans would be helped or harmed by acquitting black defendants accused of stealing the property of whites. He has portrayed his suggestions as a kind of black self-help, a direct way of adjusting the score after decades of racial oppression.
Yikes i hope this is a fringe take or somehow misrepresented ---
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways: (I measure time by how a body sways).
"While they do not disapprove of integration that occurs naturally, critical race theorists reject the classic liberal view of integration as the ultimate goal. They deride the concept of a colorblind society."
all anyone needs to hear of this nonsense before throwing it in the trash
