In their introduction to the classic collection of Critical Race Theory writings, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement<\/em>, Kendall Thomas and his colleagues conclude\u2014this is actually the last sentence of their introduction:<\/p>\n It is our hope that the writings collected here will prove to be a useful critical compass for negotiating the treacherous terrain of American racial politics in the coming century.<\/a>[1]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Critical Race Theory has been and continues to be a critical compass for so many of us. We could have predicted that back in the 1990s. What would have been less predictable at the time was that Critical Race Theory would become the target of a massive, nationwide, presidential-led misinformation campaign<\/a> in the 2020s, with the mission of eradicating Critical Race Theory, and more broadly, race-consciousness, from our language, from our schools, from our public debates, from our very consciousness. It is hard to believe that a U.S. President and political leaders from Congress all the way to local school boards would target these critical ideas and place them at the very bullseye of our culture wars. But, as Kendall Thomas and his colleagues noted, racial politics can be a \u201ctreacherous terrain.\u201d<\/p>\n In The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation<\/em>, the W.E.B. Du Bois lectures Stuart Hall delivered at Harvard University in 1994, Hall argued that race and racial discourse are not \u201ca form of truth in any case, but rather a \u2018regime of truth.\u2019\u201d He was discussing there, provocatively, the recurring matter of biological and genetic racial discourse. Hall explained: \u201cit is through its discursive operations<\/em> that race gives meaning to the world, makes a certain kind of sense of the world, constructs an order of intelligibility, organizes human practices within its categories, and thus comes to acquire real effects.\u201d Race, in Halls\u2019 words, is a \u201csliding signifier.\u201d<\/a>[2]<\/p>\n In a similar way, as a result of the recent attacks, the term \u201cCritical Race Theory\u201d is no longer simply a set of writings and theoretical interventions, but has become, as well, a sliding signifier, a discursive operation<\/em> that, for many now, means much more than the original writings and does much more work. It has come to mean, for many, any form of race-consciousness. It has become now a discursive formation <\/em>that gives meaning to the world we live in\u2014for better or for worse.<\/p>\n The objective of this seminar, Revolution 6\/13<\/a>, was to productively push those meanings of Critical Race Theory and of racial discourse, to help inspire practices that will have positive real effects.<\/p>\n At Revolution 6\/13, Kendall Thomas provided a brilliant historical account of the emergence of Critical Race Theory (\u201cCRT\u201d) in the 1980s and of the very different political context within which we find ourselves today. Thomas explained how CRT emerged at a time in which the civil rights settlement of the 1960s was being unsettled. It was a time marked by the eclipse of the civil rights paradigm, the election of President Ronald Reagan, and the advent of the Rehnquist Court. CRT developed in the face of a retreat\u2014and of the failed promise\u2014of a rights paradigm based on the framework of political liberalism and the ideas of possessive individualism.<\/p>\n CRT arose as an alternative, within the academic and institutional setting of American law schools, to both the liberal political theory paradigm and the Marxist alternative that subsumed race and gender issues to class. It positioned itself, on the one hand, against liberal legalism, which views race as a moral question: racism is conceived here as a moral error by individuals and takes the form of discrimination. This is the humanist, universalist, moral position. It also positioned itself, on the other hand, against a Marxist view that subjugated racial questions to class conflict. In effect, CRT viewed racial matters neither through the lens of morality, nor simply of class conflict, but more fundamentally through the lens of power. At base, Thomas demonstrated, CRT was a theory of power that tried to show that racial discourse had its sources and effects outside of the state, predominantly in the domain of culture. For that reason, it drew heavily on the field of cultural studies that Stuart Hall helped develop; many of the central interventions of CRT\u2014that culture is power, that law is a cultural form\u2014were influenced by cultural studies as well as by poststructuralism, deconstruction, queer theory, and the writings of Foucault, Derrida, and others.<\/p>\n Insofar as we now face today, in the United States, a very different political constellation composed of strands of neoliberalism and financialized racial capitalism, \u201cauthoritarian populism\u201d as Kendall Thomas mentions in his Oxford Lecture, and identity politics, and insofar as Critical Race Theory is now part of the national political debate (rather than the academic law school debate)\u2014the stakes, the meanings, the work that CRT does have changed dramatically and require, Kendall Thomas argued, a rethinking and retheorization.<\/p>\n Kendall Thomas argued for two major and related interventions: first, that the question of racial justice should be considered a political, rather than moral question; and second, that \u201cthe task of critical race theory is to develop a theory of racial power without resort to, that is not dependent upon, and that is not the same as a theory of racial identity.\u201d<\/p>\n In this final post, I will raise one question about the first claim (moral vs. political) and offer a few thoughts about the second (on identity politics).<\/p>\n In Kendall Thomas\u2019s presentation here and in his earlier essay, he argues against a moral understanding of racial (in)justice. He argues that questions of racial justice are not a matter of individual moral judgment (for good or bad), nor of individual virtue, but a matter of the broader political relations in a collectivity: a question of relations of power in society. As he wrote in his essay, \u201cIn my view, this \u2018moral constriction\u2019 of the public debate over racial justice fails to capture the distinctive and constitutive role of the political in racial claims-making.\u201d<\/a>[3]<\/p>\n I hear that as a confrontation between a certain kind of political or legal liberalism versus a more Foucaultian conception of power.<\/p>\n The moral view is tied to a type of possessive individualism of traditional modern political theory (Hobbes and Locke) that makes each one of us individually responsible for harm to others, in this case for racial harm to others. It is this underlying possessive individualism that grounds the conventional liberal legal responses of civil rights litigation: the idea that we have to identify the individual bad apples, who are in a sense morally culpable as individuals, and punish or correct them. This was the civil rights paradigm that CRT rebelled against, as is so well explained in Kendall Thomas\u2019s and his co-author\u2019s introduction to the CRT volume.<\/a>[4]<\/p>\n The political view, I associate with the more modern conception of relations of power that Foucault, Stuart Hall, and others put on the table. It does not focus on individual acts of immorality, but rather on the collective practices and institutions to see how power and forms of domination are distributed and maintained. This is what gives rise to notions of systemic or institutional racism that Hall and Manning Marable wrote about.<\/p>\n Now if this is right, then race and racism is one domain that intersects others\u2014gender, sexuality, class\u2014where we need to shift our ways of understanding the world from a liberal political theory view to a more critical perspective. And the question here, then, is how those domains differ in terms of how to create the paradigm shift? How does racial justice differ and intersect with gender or class justice so as to shift the liberal paradigm to a new, more structural and institutional conception of relations of power?<\/p>\n Taking a political view of racial justice requires three tasks, Kendall writes:<\/p>\n I think these tasks rest on the idea of \u201cvulnerable racial publics.\u201d But the different political extremes would split on what vulnerability is and what it entails\u2014or how a public is rendered vulnerable. The conservatives will likely argue that any race-consciousness will create \u201cvulnerable\u201d racial publics, not protect them. So we are back to square one. How exactly do we shift the paradigm without inserting that shift in our argument?<\/p>\n I hear in Kendall Thomas\u2019s second argument two threads or strains of thought: an argument against essentializing identities, and an even more radical argument about \u201cundoing\u201d identity or \u201cqueering\u201d racial identity. This raises three issues I would like to raise and formulate as preliminary thoughts.<\/p>\n a\/ anti-essentialism<\/p>\n b\/ undoing subjectivity or \u201cde-subjectification\u201d<\/p>\n c\/ racial identity as a discursive formation<\/p>\n CRT, as originally formulated, contained a robust critique of essentialized identity politics, from the start. It formulated, as one of its main theoretical foundations, a principle of anti-essentialism.<\/p>\n In Kendall Thomas and his colleagues\u2019 introduction to Key Writings<\/em>, there is a sharp critique of what they called at the time \u201cracialism\u201d:<\/p>\n black racialism yields a flat, fixed image of racial identity, experience and interest, which fails to capture the complex, constantly changing realities of racial domination in the contemporary U.S.<\/a>[5]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In the introduction, the authors referred to this as \u201ccrude essentialism\u201d and targeted in particular the support, in certain segments of Black communities, for the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.<\/a>[6]<\/p>\n At the same time, and on the other hand, Thomas and his colleagues rejected what they called \u201cvulgar anti-essentialism\u201d\u2014the position which argued, from a critical perspective (here, primarily Critical Legal Studies), that, since race was entirely a social construction and did not really exist, it could not serve as the basis for critique. Some Crits wanted effectively to give up on the category of \u201crace\u201d as an anti-essentialist move.<\/a>[7] And of course, other Marxist Crits (\u017di\u017eek today for instance) want or wanted to subsume race to class\u2014a well-known and ongoing controversy over class, race, and caste going back to the famous 1948 book by Oliver Cox by that name, Caste, Class, and Race<\/em>.<\/p>\n To summarize these different strands, Thomas and his colleagues wrote back then:<\/p>\n It was obvious to many of us that although race was, to use the term, socially constructed (the idea of biological race is \u201cfalse\u201d), race was nonetheless \u201creal\u201d in the sense that there is a material dimension and weight to the experience of being \u201craced\u201d in American society, a materiality that in significant ways has been produced and sustained by law. Thus, we understood our project as an effort to construct a race-conscious and at the same time anti-essentialist account of the processes by which law participates in \u201craceing\u201d American society.<\/a>[8]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In other words, anti-essentialism was core to CRT. And of course, we also find it in Hall and Marable. Marable, for instance, allows for an anti-essentialist \u201csorting\u201d of African-Americans as between more assimilationist and more separatist thinkers and actors. In the \u201cThird Reconstruction,\u201d African-Americans will be able to decide whether to form part of the post-capitalist predominantly-white society or the Black nation.<\/p>\n The idea of anti-essentialism, of course, is not to get rid of identity entirely, but to push back on the essentializing claims about identity. This was also the move that many progressive thinkers deployed in response to the essentializing critiques of Carol Gilligan\u2019s work on gender difference, In a Different Voice.<\/em> Some responded that the contrast between genders was not a binary opposition, but slightly different Bell-curves; so that not all<\/em> women are relationship-oriented and not all <\/em>men are rule-oriented, but that the normal curves are a little different along these lines. It\u2019s more likely that a girl or woman will be relation-oriented then a boy or man. A question of probabilities.<\/p>\n So one question here is whether anti-essentialism can do all the work Kendall Thomas might want to do in moving away from an identity politics \u2013 and if not, why not?<\/p>\n Kendall Thomas\u2019s critique of identity politics can be read as a form of undoing of identity, of de-subjectification, of queering of racial identity. By queering, I make reference to the way in which Queer Theory troubled and deconstructed gender binarities, drawing importantly on Foucault\u2019s History of Sexuality. <\/em>Stuart Hall develops this in his critique of race as fixed identity in The Fateful Triangle<\/em>, when he proposes a discursive theory of race:<\/p>\n There is no escape from what Mikhail Bakhtin would call the \u201cmultiaccentuality\u201d of racial meaning, no way of preventing culture from slipping and sliding within the indeterminate semiosis of meaning; hence there is no way of limiting or trying to fix the varieties of subjects that black people will become<\/em>. The way in which the discursive structures of a culture become permeable, reconstitutable, and thus \u201chistorical\u201d in the best and only sense of the word means that black identities are incapable of being harnessed to a mere repetition of their origins, however those origins may be construed, for the multiaccentuality of race as a sliding signifier means there is no way to limit the varieties of identity that the black experience will come to include.<\/a>[9]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In the article we read, \u201cCulture, Resistance, and Struggle<\/a>,\u201d but also in The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation<\/em>, Hall explores the question of identity, trying to unearth the ways in which identities can be reclaimed and resignified. He is particularly interested in the ways in which Caribbean and South-Asian persons who immigrated to the U.K. were able to redeploy and resignify the identity of \u201cblack\u201d in order to turn it into a form of solidarity.<\/p>\n Foucault found his inspiration for the notion of de-subjectification in Nietzsche, Bataille and Blanchot \u2013 actually his first steps toward it were with existential psychiatry in a text we will be publishing soon called Binswanger and Existential Analysis. <\/em>De-subjectification was Foucault\u2019s project: to create experiences that unsettled our experience of the present and our conceptions of self. For Foucault, drawing on the work of Nietzsche, the historical analysis of experience can lead to \u201cthe task of \u2018tearing\u2019 the subject from itself in such a way that it is no longer the subject as such, or that it is completely \u2018other\u2019 than itself so that it may arrive at its annihilation, its dissociation.\u201d<\/p>\n I think that the effort to resignify racial identities\u2014and to make it possible to undo the trappings of race\u2014is of critical importance. Here too, the question is how it differs in the domain of race versus gender or sexuality or class, and at the intersections.<\/p>\n Stuart Hall ends his Du Bois lectures on a beautiful and inspiring note. He sketches an alternative imagination of diasporic subjects, a conception of diaspora as a form of subjectivity, that is fluid and changing and multi-dimensional, that does not fall victim to the fixity of identity or to the sliding nature of race and ethnicity. He speaks there of a conception of the \u201cpolitics of identity\u201d as not being a rigid form of identity politics, but rather what he calls \u201ca field of positionalities.\u201d<\/a>[10]<\/sup> The politics of identity that he develops is one that is fluid, moving, becoming.<\/p>\n Hall does not want to talk about identity so much as \u201cmoving positions of identity that are transformed by history and culture.\u201d<\/a>[11]<\/sup> Relying on earlier work,<\/a>[12]<\/sup> Hall suggests that \u201cidentity is not a matter of essence but of positioning, and hence there is always a politics of identity, a politics of position and positionality\u2026\u201d<\/a>[13]<\/sup> He concludes there, \u201cI am arguing that cultural identities matter not because they fix us into place politically but because they are what is at stake\u2014<\/em>what is won or lost\u2014in cultural politics.\u201d<\/a>[14]<\/sup><\/p>\n Hall reaches for a \u201cpositionality\u201d of fluid identities. He writes, \u201crather than a binary structure in which positions can only repeat one another, are always in the same place, and stay fixed there until the end of time.\u201d<\/a>[15]<\/sup><\/p>\n The notion of diaspora allows for a much more fluid and cosmopolitan subject, that negotiates spaces of travel and different languages. \u201cSuch subjects,\u201d he writes \u201cmust learn to inhabit more than one identity, dwell in more than one culture, and speak more than one language.\u201d<\/a>[16]<\/sup> There is a romantic element to this ideal of the diasporic subject as having an openness to difference and being a kind of becoming in the final paragraph of the lectures. He writes, \u201csuch identities are always open, complex, under construction, taking part in an unfinished game.\u201d<\/a>[17]<\/sup> And then he concludes: \u201cThe question is not who we are<\/em>, but who we can become<\/em>. The task of theory in relation to the new cultural politics of difference is not to think as we always did, keeping the faith by trying to hold the terrain together through an act of compulsive will, but to learn to think differently<\/em>.\u201d<\/a>[18]<\/sup><\/p>\n There is here, too, a notion of becoming in the Nietzschean sense, becoming rather than being\u2014a notion of transformation, fluidity, openness. This notion of becoming, and its paradoxical relation to identity, is what I feel I need to explore further. I will in a forthcoming essay for Social Research<\/em>. So, farewell for now, but more to come soon\u2026<\/p>\n <\/a>[1] Kimberl\u00e9 Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas,\u00a0Introduction to\u00a0<\/a>Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement\u00a0<\/em>(New York: New Press, 1995), xxxii.<\/p>\n <\/a>[2] Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation<\/em> [1994] (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 77.<\/p>\n <\/a>[3] Kendall Thomas, \u201cRacial Justice: Moral or Political?<\/a>,\u201d in\u00a0Looking Back at Law\u2019s Century<\/em>, ed. Austin Sarat, Bryant Garth, Robert A. Kagan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 85.<\/p>\n <\/a>[4] Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, and Thomas,\u00a0Introduction to\u00a0<\/a>Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/a>[5] Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, and Thomas, \u201cIntroduction,\u201d xxxi.<\/p>\n <\/a>[6] Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, and Thomas, \u201cIntroduction,\u201d xxxi.<\/p>\n <\/a>[7] Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, and Thomas, \u201cIntroduction,\u201d xxvi.<\/p>\n <\/a>[8] Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, and Thomas, \u201cIntroduction,\u201d xxvi.<\/p>\n <\/a>[9] Hall, The Fateful Triangle<\/em>, 76.<\/p>\n <\/a>[10] Hall, The Fateful Triangle,<\/em> 172.<\/p>\n <\/a>[11] Hall, The Fateful Triangle,<\/em> 127 [find quote, not sure of page].<\/p>\n <\/a>[12] Hall, The Fateful Triangle,<\/em> see footnote three on page 190.<\/p>\n <\/a>[13] Hall, The Fateful Triangle<\/em>, 130.<\/p>\n <\/a>[14] Hall, The Fateful Triangle<\/em>, 130.<\/p>\n <\/a>[15] Hall, The Fateful Triangle<\/em>, 172.<\/p>\n <\/a>[16] Hall, The Fateful Triangle<\/em>, 173.<\/p>\n <\/a>[17] Hall, The Fateful Triangle<\/em>, 174.<\/p>\n <\/a>[18] Hall, The Fateful Triangle<\/em>, 174.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Bernard E. Harcourt In their introduction to the classic collection of Critical Race Theory writings, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, Kendall Thomas and his colleagues conclude\u2014this is actually the last sentence of their introduction:… Continue Reading Kendall Thomas\u2019s Intervention<\/h1>\n
1\/\u00a0 Racial Justice: Moral versus Political<\/h1>\n
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2\/\u00a0\u00a0 The Question of Identity Politics<\/h1>\n
A.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Anti-essentialism<\/h2>\n
B.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Undoing Racial Identity and De-subjectification<\/h2>\n
C.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Paradox of Identity and Becoming<\/h2>\n
Notes<\/h1>\n