Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 47

In the 1970s, critical legal studies (CritLS) emerged from a radical group of predominantly white male legal academics (see Crenshaw, 2002; Wing, 1997). The CritLS scholars questioned the objectivity of laws that they claimed for centuries had inherently oppressed the poor, people of Color, and women, either outright or in their applications (Crenshaw, 2002; Seiler, 2003). Some people of Color and women who were scholars in the radical left worried that however well-meaning and radical the CritLS component was, they seemed unable to promote an analysis beyond the white male elite lens through which they viewed the world (Wing, 1997, p. 2). These scholars, led by Derrick Bell, started critical race theory (CRT) in the mid-1970s, and it fully emerged in the late 1980s (Wing, 1997). Delgado and Stefancic (2017) define CRT as a “progressive legal movement to transform the relationship among race, racism, and power” (p. 171).

Bell’s (1973) book, Race, Racism, and American Law, is an early treatise of the many ways U.S. law discriminates by race. The originators of CRT believed that the civil rights movement had stalled and that the old approaches of marches, amicus briefs, and litigation were increasingly ineffective in combating de facto discrimination (Bell, 1973, p. 2). Instead they emphasized that recognizing and accounting for white privilege and power are core to understanding racism in the systemic discrimination and civil rights violations of people of Color (see Bell, 1973; Crenshaw, 2002; Seiler, 2003). CRT identifies three beliefs accepted by mainstream society as myths: (1) Ignoring race eliminates racism; (2) racism is caused by individuals, not systems; and (3) racism can be fought alone, without recognizing sexism, classism, homophobia, and so on (Valdes, Culp, & Harris, 2002). Central to CRT is the assumption/problem that race is completely embedded in U.S. laws and policies. It is worth noting that student activism around increasing diversity in higher education in the 1960s through 1990s has been credited with the development of CRT (Cho & Westley, 1999), and CRT continues to develop (Valdes et al., 2002).

Although there are limited applications of CRT to studies of crime, a recent one addresses the idea of schools representing relatively safe havens for youths until the 1990s. Watts and Erevelles (2004) point out that violence in urban schools in areas with social exploitation and high unemployment was ignored until violence hit the suburban and rural white schools in high-profile shootings (e.g., Marjorie Douglas High School in Florida and Columbine High School in Colorado). Today, according to the authors, many public schools serve simply as institutions of social control, and school violence is not a result of a few “violent” students but rather institutions that base norms on Whiteness and disability status. They conclude that whether the violent students are inner-city African Americans and Latinx or middle- and upper-class white boys, “their failure to measure up (to the rigid social norms including those of masculinity) ensured their isolation and provoked them to commit horrifying acts” (Watts & Erevelles, 2004, p. 293). Thus, the answer to school violence is not to get rid of the “rotten kids” but to provide institutions that are not oppressing the students.