Since we published the first edition of this book in 2001, the United States has lived through two economic downturns, an outbreak of terrorism, and the onset of an epidemic of hate directed against newcomers, especially undocumented Latinos and Middle Eastern people. On a more hopeful note, the country elected and reelected its first black president and enacted a comprehensive health-reform measure providing access to health care for many of the formerly uninsured. Gay rights advanced impressively.
The country’s demography has changed, as well. Latinos, at about 17 percent of the population, are now the largest minority group, having displaced African Americans, who make up about 13 percent. Asian Americans, although smaller numerically, have increased even more rapidly than the other two larger groups. In California, minorities of color together exceed the white population in size, if not yet in influence. Other states are not far behind.
President Barack Obama’s two terms elicited a vigorous response in the form of the Tea Party movement as well as an upsurge in hate speech and opposition to immigration, some of it taking the form of blogs, Internet websites, and talk-radio programs. Globalization, outsourcing, and maquiladoras continued to remove tens of thousands of jobs, so that the gap in income and family wealth between the richest few and the rest of society stands at one of the highest levels ever. Police profiling and shootings, the war on drugs, and harsh sentencing policies heightened minority miseries and swelled the prison population. More than fifteen years later, many of these problems remain.
Critical race theory has taken note of all these developments. As the reader will see, a new generation of critical race scholars has examined these issues and more. Employing the same reader-friendly language, absence of buzzwords and jargon, numerous examples, and excerpts from leading court opinions, the third edition brings Critical Race Theory: An Introduction up-to-date. The reader will learn about new areas of scholarship, including studies of policing, sentencing, and incarceration; campus climate; workplace pressures; implicit bias; affirmative action; and race and class. Critical race theory continues to spread to other countries; fields, such as sociology, education, philosophy, and religion; and constituencies, such as campus activists. We include new questions for discussion, some of them aimed at posing practical steps that readers can take to advance a progressive race agenda.
We used a modified form of legal (Bluebook) citation style for the items that appear in the Suggested Readings at the end of each chapter. Authors of articles and books appear first in the citation, followed by the title. For an article in a journal, the volume number appears next, followed by the name of the journal and the first page of the article, ending with the year of publication.
RICHARD DELGADO and JEAN STEFANCIC
Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 2016