Critical Race Theory

Prerna
2021
Critical Race Theory (Crenshaw Reading)
• Movement of left scholars mostly scholars of color

• Work challenges the ways in which race and racial power are
constructed and represented in legal culture and in society

• No canonical set of doctrines or methodologies and diverse

group but two common interests
 Two common interests
• First to understand how a regime of white supremacy and its
subordination of people of colour has been created and
maintained?

• Second not just to understand the vexed bond between law and
racial power but to change it

Shares an ethical commitment to human liberation but no

consensus on what it is.
Pursuit of Engaged even Adversarial
Scholarship
• Contribution to what Edward Said calls ‘Antithetical Scholarship’

• Antithetical Scholarship : development of counter accounts of social

reality by subversive and sub altern elements of the reigning order.

• Rejects the prevailing orthodoxy that scholarship should be or cold

neutral or objective

• Scholarship on race cannot be done from a distance or with objectivity

How Scholarship should be undertaken?
• Racial Power exercised legally and ideologically, legal
scholarship about race an important site for the construction the
power
• No exit, no scholarly perch outside of the social dynamics of
racial power
• The formal production, identification and organization of what
will be considered knowledge is always a political enterprise.