Читать книгу The Racialized Social System - Ali Meghji - Страница 10

Despite its emergence as a critical project speaking back against structural racism in two of the major US structures – both law and education – some within the academy were unsure whether the ‘T’ in critical race theory was really warranted. In other words, some doubted whether CRT was really a theory at all. Of course, some of this criticism was levelled by those who were opposed to the overall mission and/or methods of CRT. Scholars like Rubin (1992: 960), for instance, have charged CRT with being circular, claiming that ‘Critical race theory is only a partial subdiscipline; although it is based on distinctive norms, it lacks the distinctive methodology that characterizes critical legal studies or law and economics. It relies on familiar methods of analysis and frames familiar arguments to support its distinctive premises’, while others such as Farber and Sherry (1993: 814) have taken specific issue with the counter storytelling method:

critical race theory has not yet established a comparable empirical foundation. We know of no work on critical race theory that discusses psychological or other social science studies supporting the existence of a voice of color. Most critical race theorists simply postulate the existence of a difference […] One scholar denies that the existence of a distinct voice of color can or need be proven, as it is solely a matter of authorial intent: Those who intend to speak in the voice of color do so […] Thus far, however, there has been no demonstration of how those new perspectives differ from the various perspectives underlying traditional scholarship.

Perhaps the critiques I find more intellectually stimulating, however, are those from scholars who are critical of CRT’s status as a theory, but who remain dedicated to its overall mission and method(s). Indeed, even one of the pioneers of CRT itself – Crenshaw – could be said to be of this ilk when she declares CRT is a verb rather than a noun.¹⁹ To such scholars, CRT may be conceived of better as a ‘critical knowledge project’ – in Patricia Hill Collins’ (2019) language – rather than being necessarily a critical social theory. This argument is most explicitly spelled out by Treviño, Harris and Wallace (2008: 9), as we have seen, when they claim that:

CRT has many rigorous concepts and methods, but these have not been coherently integrated in a way that would give CRT the systematic structure – the intellectual architecture – that is representative, and in fact required, of most social theory. What we frequently get with CRT is not a unified theory but a loose hodgepodge of analytic tools that are frequently used in a catch-as-catch-can manner.

Central to Treviño et al.’s argument is that CRT may have a shared ethos built around the shared tenets of counter storytelling, seeing racism as normal and purposeful, intersectionality and so on, but this does not necessarily provide the whole conceptual architecture necessary for CRT to be labelled social theory. This critique, for me, opens up two particular questions. Firstly, why should we care whether something is, or is not, a social theory? Secondly, do we want CRT to be considered social theory? I believe that we can engage with both of these questions by turning to another approach in CRT – and indeed the approach the rest of the book will centre on – which shows the benefits of viewing CRT as social theory: the racialized social system approach.