On Critical Race Theory
Why It Matters & Why You Should Care
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
What exactly is critical race theory? This concise and accessible exploration demystifies a crucial framework for understanding and fighting racial injustice in the United States.
“A clear-eyed, expert field guide.”—Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom, author of Thick
From renowned scholar Dr. Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory explains the centrality of race in American history and politics, and how the often mischaracterized intellectual movement became a political necessity.
Ray draws upon the radical thinking of giants such as Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to clearly trace the foundations of critical race theory in the Black intellectual traditions of emancipation and the civil rights movement. From these foundations, Ray explores the many facets of our society that critical race theory interrogates, from deeply embedded structural racism to the historical connection between whiteness and property, ownership, and more.
In succinct, thoughtful essays, Ray presents, analyzes, and breaks down the scholarship and concepts that constitute this often misconstrued term. He explores how the conversation on critical race theory has expanded into the contemporary popular conscience, showing why critical race theory matters and why we should all care.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
University of Iowa sociologist Ray debuts with an illuminating primer on critical race theory. He details the field's genesis in legal studies—specifically the insight that ostensibly race-neutral laws can perpetuate racist outcomes—and its incorporation of other social sciences. A brief overview of racism as "a basic organizing principle in America's political history" (the three-fifths compromise, Jim Crow) is followed by lucid explanations of key concepts in critical race theory, including the idea that race is not an immutable biological attribute, but a malleable social and political construction used to justify exploitation. Elsewhere, Ray draws on the example of the civil rights movement, which achieved its greatest successes at a time when the Soviet Union was exploiting America's racial hypocrisy to spread its influence around the world, to argue that racial progress has typically been made when it benefits a critical mass of white people. Ray also contends that "when it comes to political agenda–setting, White identity politics are the most successful identity politics in American history," because they insist on a normative neutrality that allows other people's political goals to be classed as "special interests." Distinguished by its clarity of thought, purpose, and expression, this is a stirring defense of critical race theory as an "intellectual bulwark" against attempts to undermine multiracial democracy.
