Abstract
As debates over teaching Critical Race Theory (CRT) spread through the US, England, and Australia, Ali Meghji's comprehensive and accessible book offers much needed clarification of the definition of CRT and its emergence in the 1980s legal studies. CRT is in current use by social science disciplines, most prominently in the field of education. Beyond clarifying misconceptions, Meghji engages the internal debates concerning the strengths and limitations of CRT. Most importantly, this book links the overall discussion to the earlier roots of critical race perspectives in the social sciences and relates CRT to earlier conceptual frameworks dating back almost a century. The author brings together the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Oliver Cox, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Manning Marable, Patricia Hill Collins, Eduardo Bonilla Silva, and others who contributed theoretical understandings of racialized social systems and identified micro, macro, and meso levels of analysis. Meghji uses the metaphor of maps to demonstrate how existing conceptual frameworks of race in sociology overlay larger maps of racialized systems, noting which ones address different objectives, such as racial formations. He also identifies useful sociological concepts used to build existing racial concepts and theories that further embed Meghji's work in the tradition of sociology.
The book begins by examining CRT as a formulation that has been used in social science research investigating the racial inequalities embedded in social structures—the major distinction from research on social psychology, prejudice, and group formation. CRT emerged in legal jurisprudence and activism to call attention to the lack of legal and social progress in realizing the gains of the civil rights movement and the growing power of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. When equal opportunity rather than equal outcomes became the state's focus, legal scholars began to analyze how the legal system itself established and maintained racial dominance.
Meghji attributes major CRT tenets consistent with sociological critical race writings:
Racism is a product of social arrangements, racism functions to rationalize and reproduce racial inequality, race is socially constructed, intersectional approaches are essential for researching and understanding race, and there are unique voices of color distinct from the dominant voice of whites.
Along with being quite accessible for students and scholars outside the field of race in sociology, examples from the US, the UK, Australia, Brazil, and South Africa are used throughout the book; the examples serve to ground the reader and clarify concepts.
Building on the legal discipline of CRT, social scientists set out to construct empirical and theoretical foundations for social theory intended to eliminate racial oppression and engage social reality and social justice. Drawing on Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's writings on the racialized social system, six concepts are cited: racial interests, racial ideology, racial grammar, racialized emotions, racialized interaction order, and racialized organizations. These concepts set up four chapters that lay out the components of the racialized social system. Chapter one provides an overview of the construction of race and unequal distribution across the racial hierarchy. It unpacks the ways that racialized actors build interests to maintain or oppose the racialized social system, that, Meghji, argues, is a social space that is both relational and contested. Whites are invested in maintaining and reproducing the existing racial hierarchy of the social order and benefit from concessions or racial realism rather than structural changes.
Chapter two examines the micro level that reproduces and formulates the racialized social system, as well as linking ideology to emotional bonds that operate to communicate racial ideologies. In chapter three, Meghji uses an interactionalist approach to demonstrate how the racialized social system disseminates interactional risks and rights across the racialized interaction order. Two important types of interaction orders at the macro level are interconnected to limit interaction among racialized individuals and reproduce or establish race through microaggressions and controlling images. Chapter four lays out the meso-level consisting of racialized organizations and structures that function as mechanisms to restrict the agency of people of color. Organizations foster agency for white people and legitimate racial inequality. Many race scholars will appreciate the discussion of the way that cultural industries, racial grammar, and racialized imagery legitimate the unequal distribution of economic and social resources, especially cultural capital. The concluding chapter addresses CRT's limitations and strengths, particularly postcolonial challenges, and the ability to incorporate transnational and historical analysis. Meghji makes the distinction between conceptual flexibility and theoretical universalism early in the book to skirt the problem of arguing that CRT can provide a theoretical framework “to study all dimensions of racialization and racism across all of time and space” (p. 3).
Some readers may be left without a clear understanding of how intersectionality relates to the components of the racialized social system. Given the wide use of intersectionality in critical race research, much more discussion is warranted. Many sociologists embracing CRT in the early 1990s may be surprised by the work highlighted in the introduction. Most of us were introduced to CRT in Derrick Bell's foundational work Bottom of the Well, which was vital in establishing the significance of counternarratives that allowed unique voices to be heard and understood. Crenshaw’s et al. (1995) edited Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, particularly the introduction that offers a detailed history and background to legal cases significant in CRT as a movement in legal scholarship and activism, is a much better source than Richard Delgado’s (1995) edited collection that is cited. Unfortunately, although LatCrit can be found in the index, its contributions to CRT in legal studies, sociology, and education are largely missing. Among CRT projects, LatCrit formed an association holding annual conferences for several decades that nurtured TribalCrit, QueerCrit, DesiCrit, and CRT in the US and internationally. However, these are minor criticisms compared to the book's overall accomplishment of mapping and identifying the places that the various concepts fit into the larger map of the racialized social system and connecting the rich tradition of critical race studies to Black sociologists in the US.