Conclusion
Chapter 7 described critical race theory today. Now, it is time to offer some thoughts on the future. This will include hazarding some predictions on the range of problems that civil rights activists and theorists may face as well as the choices for tackling them. Finally, we consider how the establishment may react to some of the movement’s efforts.
Imagine a young, female child born in the year 2017. She might be white, black, brown, Asian, or mixed race. The color does not matter. Her religion might be Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or atheist. What sort of world will she inherit? During her early years, the number of blacks and Latinos will be almost equal, with Asians a fast-growing minority as well. Whites, however, will continue to be in the numerical majority until about 2042 and will remain the largest single group into the foreseeable future.
At first, our child is apt to grow up in a segregated neighborhood and attend segregated schools. Courts have been ending desegregation decrees, while conservatives have been lobbying effectively for the end of affirmative action in higher education—and may succeed despite the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding that practice in Fisher v. University of Texas. U.S. wealth is sharply split between a very well-to-do group at the top of the socioeconomic ladder and everybody else. If our child is lucky enough to be born into a well-to-do family, she may grow up in a gated community with excellent services, schools, and private security forces. If not, she will live—if white—at a level roughly comparable to a midlevel European country, such as Spain or Italy, or a struggling Third World country, if black or brown. The new economy, based on information technology and a large service sector, will do little to alter this distribution of wealth and influence.
A few decades later, as our child is approaching adulthood, conditions may change. U.S. minorities of color will grow in numbers and begin, for the first time, to pose political and economic competition for whites. The number of minority judges, business executives, and politicians holding elective office will inexorably increase. At the same time, globalization and the need to cultivate business with developing countries will begin to place a premium on multicultural, multiracial people who can speak other languages and interact easily with their foreign counterparts. Minorities will find new niches in the world economy.
Will this power shift occur peacefully or only after a long struggle? The reader’s guess is as good as ours. One school of social science holds that socioeconomic competition heightens racial tensions, at least in the short run. At the same time, interest-convergence theory suggests that as the world becomes more cosmopolitan and minority status and linguistic competence evolve into positive assets, the opposite may occur, much as it has done during wartime. (See Philip A. Klinkner & Rogers M. Smith, The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America [1999].) If so, barriers against minority home ownership, job mobility, and entry to universities and colleges may ease somewhat. Colleges and workplaces will try new programs to increase the flow of minorities into the market; scholars and lawyers will find new legal theories, acceptable to courts, allowing this to happen. Workplaces will heed the call of Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati and stop pressuring minority workers to perform extra work on the job concealing their blackness or brownness and reassuring their fellow workers that they are not frightening, foreign, or incompetent. With luck, our hypothetical child, toward the end of her life, will experience a peaceful transition to a more inclusive, polyglot America. A third Reconstruction, somewhat along the lines of the 1960s, may take place, but more slowly, surely, and irreversibly.
Of course, the peaceful transition just described may not take place—the white establishment may resist an orderly progression toward power sharing, particularly in connection with upper-level and technical jobs, police agencies, and government. As happened in South Africa, the change may be convulsive and cataclysmic. If so, critical theorists and activists will need to provide criminal defense for resistance movements and activists and to articulate theories and strategies for that resistance. Or a third, intermediate regime may set in. As mentioned earlier, whites may deploy neocolonial mechanisms, including token concessions and the creation of a host of light-skinned minority middle managers to stave off the transfer of power as long as possible.
But, assuming that the transition proceeds and is relatively peaceable, civil rights activists and scholars will need to address a host of issues as the United States changes complexion. These include the continued deconstruction of race, so that biological theories of inferiority and hierarchy cannot ever again arise. They include further efforts to erase barriers to upward mobility for minority populations, especially old-fashioned tests and standards for merit, such as the SAT, that currently stand in the way. Prompted by critical theorists, some schools are doing this now.
Those efforts will include measures, such as economic boycotts, aimed at increasing minority representation in the media as well as countering publishers, writers, cartoonists, and movie producers who continue to distribute demeaning caricatures of minorities. They include rectifying racism in policing and the criminal justice system, so that young minority men have a better chance of going to college than to jail. They will include, as well, sentencing reform and attention to postconviction consequences such as felony disenfranchisement that otherwise will haunt an offender for the rest of his or her life. The needed efforts will include assuring that minority viewpoints and interests are taken into account, as though by second nature, in every major policy decision the nation makes.
Critical race theorists will need to take part in the development of new immigration policies that allow a freer flow of workers and capital, while assuring that the new arrivals do not enter on terms that weaken the ability of current workers to unionize and seek workplace reforms. Immigration law’s defects will need attention so that people, including young, often unaccompanied, children, escaping totalitarian regimes do not end up in large detention centers or deported back to whence they came, suffering nightmares, impaired cognitive development, other psychic ills, and even death in the process.
These activists will need to assure that society cease requiring assimilation as a ticket for admission to jobs, neighborhoods, and schools and that minorities who choose to retain their culture, language, accent, religion, or ways of dress may do so without penalty. They will need to pursue zealously the goal of economic democracy, so that the currently disproportionate numbers of people of color who suffer intense poverty receive a decent level of services, health care, and education so that they—or, at least, their children—have a chance of taking part in mainstream American life. They will need to clarify, as well, the relationship between race and class as separate but overlapping vectors of disadvantage.
Above all, they will need to marshal every conceivable argument, exploit every chink, crack, and glimmer of interest convergence to make these reforms palatable to a majority that only at a few times in its history has seen fit to tolerate them; then they will need to assure, through appropriate legislation and other structural measures, that the reforms cannot easily be undone. This may necessitate making connections with counterparts in foreign countries so as to draw on their experiences and learn from each other.
Assuming that the future goes roughly as we have outlined—with difficulty, resistance, and thinly veiled repression in the short run but broader vistas beginning a few decades in the future—and assuming that CRT takes on many of the tasks outlined in the preceding section, what does the future hold for CRT as a movement? A number of options seem possible.
CRT could become the new civil rights orthodoxy. The voter-representation schemes (including cumulative voting, described in chapter 7) put forward by Lani Guinier and others could be enacted, assuring a larger number of mayors, senators, and members of Congress of color. Courts could soften their approach to hate-speech regulation, as urged by authors such as Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence, and Richard Delgado, perhaps realizing that an increasingly multicultural society cannot tolerate concerted marginalization and revilement of a substantial segment of its membership. Nativism against Latinos might ease, and the nation may adopt a new, more liberal immigration policy. The critique of color blindness may, one day, persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to accept race-conscious measures in employment and education, leveling the playing field for those who have long been excluded from society’s bounty. A new “Americanized” federal Indian law policy, as advocated by Robert Williams, might recognize Indian tribes, unequivocally, as sovereign nations. The nation might begin considering reparations toward this group, as well as toward blacks, whose ancestors were enslaved, and Chicanos and Puerto Ricans, whose lands were taken and homelands colonized.
Critical race theory may even follow the example of critical legal studies (CLS), which embedded itself so thoroughly in academic scholarship and teaching that its precepts became commonplace, part of the conventional wisdom. This may, in fact, be happening. Consider how in many disciplines scholars, teachers, and courses profess, almost incidentally, to embrace critical race theory. Consider as well how many influential commentators, journalists, and books, such as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, develop critical themes while hardly mentioning their origins in critical thought. Might critical race theory one day diffuse into the atmosphere, like air, so that we are hardly aware of it anymore?
The new race scholars could also be ignored, as they were in the movement’s early days (see chapter 1). Presidents, college faculties, and commissions on race could go back to seeking counsel from the voices of incrementalism and color blindness, perhaps out of a desire to engage in denial or to “keep the lid on” as long as possible.
The movement has already drawn its share of detractors who see it as overly radical, inconsistent with Enlightenment philosophy, and a bad example to minority communities. More could be persuaded to this point of view, especially if right-wing talk radio and websites continue to proliferate and gain popularity, or if the country’s party politics shift radically.
A perhaps more likely outcome is that some aspects of critical race theory will be accepted by society’s mainstream and halls of power, while other parts of it will continue to meet resistance. The narrative turn and storytelling scholarship seem well on their way toward acceptance, as does the critique of merit. The rise of social media has only accelerated these trends. Intersectionality seems well entrenched in women’s studies and other disciplines. More radical features, such as recognition that the status quo is inherently racist, rather than merely sporadically and accidentally so, seem less likely to gain acceptance. The need for regulation of hate crime and speech will probably become evident, as it has to dozens of European and Commonwealth nations.
If even these relatively mild insights of critical race theory are adopted, however, the effort will not have been in vain. American society, not to mention its intellectual community, seems receptive to thinking (if not acting) more creatively about race. Certainly, mainstream liberal civil rights law has been generating little excitement, nor has it provided much in the way of support for minority communities in great need of it. Perhaps if outsider scholars—and new converts and fellow travelers—persist, their work in time will come to seem not so strange or even radical, and change may come to American society, however slowly and painfully.
Virginia’s statute does not run afoul of the First Amendment insofar as it bans cross burning with intent to intimidate. Unlike the statute at issue in R.A.V., the Virginia statute does not single out for opprobrium only that speech directed toward “one of the specified disfavored topics.” It does not matter whether an individual burns a cross with intent to intimidate because of the victim’s race, gender, or religion, or because of the victim’s “political affiliation, union membership, or homosexuality.” . . .
The First Amendment permits Virginia to outlaw cross burnings done with the intent to intimidate because burning a cross is a particularly virulent form of intimidation. . . . Virginia may choose to regulate this subset of intimidating messages in light of cross burning’s long and pernicious history as a signal of impending violence.
Virginia v. Black, 538 U.S. 343, 344–45 (2003)
Write down five predictions for how you see America’s racial scene developing twenty-five years from now. Put this paper in a safe place for future reference. Before doing so, compare notes with three other persons in your class or study group. How many of your predictions overlap? Possible areas you may wish to consider: Will the United States ever have a black woman president? (In the first edition of this book, we asked how soon readers thought a black president would arrive.) A Latino/a? An Asian American? A gay, lesbian, or transgender leader?
Will the United States ever have open immigration, or will it take the opposite tack of greatly limiting immigration? Will minority numbers really exceed those of whites midway in the twenty-first century, as many demographers believe, and what will happen then? Will race and racism ever disappear? Will the Human Genome Project show that the eugenicists and race-IQ researchers were at least partly right and that real, nontrivial differences do mark the races? Intermarriage between blacks and whites is now very low—on the order of a few percent of all marriages. Will this increase? Will a crisis cause all racialized minorities to unite in a broad, powerful coalition—and, if so, what sort of crisis could produce that result? Suppose the country absorbs a second major terrorist strike. What will it do to your predictions?