Chapter 16

The Rise of Critical Race Theory

In the summer of 1989, Derrick Bell and a small group of his disciples assembled at the St. Benedict Center, a convent turned retreat destination outside Madison, Wisconsin.¹

The meeting gathered together many of the key figures of the new racialist legal movement that Bell had cultivated as a teacher. Bell had always felt alienated from his colleagues at Harvard and spent much of his time with his students, particularly racial minorities, who affirmed his worldview and participated in his activism. He had raised the fundamental question—what to do in the face of permanent racism and the failures of legal equality—and his young students, most of whom came of age in the post–civil rights era, sought to answer it.

Kimberlé Crenshaw, the lead organizer of the conference, tells the story of planning for the Wisconsin “summer camp” and coining the term for the new intellectual movement that followed. “I began to scribble down words associated with our objectives, identities, and perspectives, drawing arrows and boxes around them to capture various aspects of who ‘we’ were and what we were doing,” Crenshaw recalled. “We settled on what seemed to be the most telling marker for this peculiar subject. We would signify the specific political and intellectual location of the project through ‘critical,’ the substantive focus through ‘race,’ and the desire to develop a coherent account of race and law through the term ‘theory.’”² Or, as Crenshaw summarized later, in a nod to Marcuse: “We discovered ourselves to be critical theorists who did race, and we were racial justice advocates who did critical theory.”³

And thus the new discipline of “critical race theory” was born.

Crenshaw and the other student organizers eventually persuaded twenty-four legal scholars—all racial minorities, as whites were officially barred from participation⁴—to submit papers, give presentations, and attend the summit. The contrast between the ideology and the setting of the first summit, an old Catholic convent, did not escape the participants of the new group. “I was a member of the founding conference,” recalled Richard Delgado, who would become the key chronicler of the movement. “We gathered at that convent for two and a half days, around a table in an austere room with stained glass windows and crucifixes here and there—an odd place for a bunch of Marxists—and worked out a set of principles.”⁵

They imagined themselves as outsiders, relegated to the margins of academia, coming together out of necessity. Derrick Bell provided their anchor, but the young scholars dreamed of moving beyond critique and establishing a method for surpassing the regime of colorblind equality. They saw the new discipline as a way to revitalize the study of law and infuse it with a pastiche of critical theory, racialist ideology, and Marxist politics. They hoped to transform the American constitution to achieve, if not justice, then retribution.

Although they were grasping at the time, worried that they were academic impostors,⁶ their theories would travel far beyond the confines of their small group of minority law professors. “At the outset,” Delgado said many years later, “I had no idea that critical race theory would become a household word.”⁷

In the years following the conference, the newly minted critical race theorists published a burst of academic papers that solidified the discipline. This work was collated, condensed, and contextualized in two books, Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge and Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, both of which were published in 1995 and, together, comprised the core of the new philosophy. The self-described “misfits”⁸ and “outsiders”⁹ had put together an intellectual stew, combining elements of critical theory, critical legal studies, postmodernism, radical feminism, black nationalism, and neo-Marxism.¹⁰ They mixed-and-matched the most acidic parts of modern thought, beginning from the assertion that “objective truth, like merit, does not exist,”¹¹ continuing to the Derrick Bell–style posture of “deep dissatisfaction with traditional civil rights discourse,”¹² and ending with a call for a “war of position”¹³ against whiteness, colorblindness, private property, and traditional constitutional theory.

The critical race theorists did not pretend to be dispassionate scholars in pursuit of knowledge. They saw themselves as political activists in pursuit of change.

In the early years, the critical race theorists imagined their academic theories serving the same function as Marxist ideology, with race replacing class as the key axis of oppression and resistance. “By legitimizing the use of race as a theoretical fulcrum and focus in legal scholarship, so-called racialist accounts of racism and the law grounded the subsequent development of Critical Race Theory in much the same way that Marxism’s introduction of class structure and struggle into classical political economy grounded subsequent critiques of social hierarchy and power,” wrote Kimberlé Crenshaw and her co-editors in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement.¹⁴ “We have shown that the putatively neutral baseline [of colorblind legal equality] is in fact a mechanism for perpetuating the distribution of rights, privileges, and opportunity established under a regime of uncontested white supremacy. Critical Race Theory recognizes accordingly that a return to that so-called neutral baseline would mean a return to an unjust system of racial power.”¹⁵

The elements of critical race theory are, in fact, a near-perfect transposition of race onto the basic structures of Marxist theory. “White supremacy” replaces “capitalism” as the totalizing system. “White and black” replaces “bourgeoisie and proletariat” as the “oppressor and oppressed.” “Abolition” replaces “revolution” as the method of “liberation.”

This is not a mere metaphor or post hoc comparison. The critical race theorists appeal directly to Marxist theoreticians and the Marxist-Leninist figures of the black liberation movement. Although in subsequent years they sought to downplay or deny their Marxist lineage—Crenshaw famously refused to answer whether critical race theory was “Marxism” on national television¹⁶—one can uncover the entire intellectual genealogy in the paragraphs and footnotes of the discipline’s original texts, which appeal to Marx, Davis, Freire, and the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary movements.

These beliefs were fundamental. Even after the collapse of global communism, the critical race theorists continued to believe that the essential thrust of Marxian theory, translated into praxis, was correct. They sought to reprise the old dialectical unity of Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis and apply it directly to the realm of the law, waging a self-conscious intellectual war against “the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”¹⁷

The young scholars had a driving ambition and, following the model of Derrick Bell and playing the game of elite institutional politics, had earned the academic credentials to ensure that their ideas would be heard.

* * *

Since the beginning, critical race theory was designed to be a weapon. The critical race theorists spent years building an ideology they believed could undermine the authority of the “white male voice”¹⁸ and disrupt the certainties of the “white academy.”¹⁹ They built an intellectual system that promised to replace Western rationality with a racialist alternative, dramatically expand their coalition with a new concept of political identity, and, from their base in academia, devise a strategy for capturing America’s elite institutions.

The first key element of critical race theory is the discipline’s reconceptualization of the truth. By the mid-1990s, the young law professors who were affiliated with the movement had absorbed a thoroughly postmodern epistemology, arguing that Western rationality was a mask for power and domination. They followed the fashionable line of French post-structuralist philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, arguing that “truth is a social construct created to suit the purposes of the dominant group”²⁰ and casting skepticism on traditional notions of knowledge, justice, and freedom. They began their political project with the ambition of exploding the epistemology of natural rights, which would make way for a radical reinterpretation. They wanted to replace the old system of colorblindness, equality, and individual rights with a new system one might call a theory of “racial reasoning.”

The initial task was to attack the idea of rationality itself. In Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, law professors Gary Peller and Charles Lawrence III made an aggressive case for demolishing the existing conceptions of knowledge, which, Peller suggested, serve as a form of “academic colonialism” that placed white cultural norms over minority alternatives.²¹ Following the radical critique of black nationalist sociologists, Peller proposed that “objective reason or knowledge could not exist because one’s position in the social structure of race relations influenced what one would call ‘knowledge’ or ‘rationality.’” In other words, there is no neutral frame for interpreting society, but rather a plurality of racially contingent frames based on one’s position as either “the oppressed or the oppressor, either African-Americans or whites, either the sociologist or the subject.”

Therefore, Peller argued, the “knowledge” and “rationality” that underpinned the dominant liberal order—everything from constitutional law to the capitalist economy to the school curriculum—provided a pretense of universalism that, in practice, served to subordinate racial minorities. “There could be no neutral theory of knowledge” in the black nationalist critique, Peller maintained. “Knowledge was itself a function of the ability of the powerful to impose their own views, to differentiate between knowledge and myth, reason and emotion, and objectivity and subjectivity.”²²

Charles Lawrence III took the logic of racial reasoning to its conclusion by offering a racialist alternative to the “the colonizer’s canon.”²³ He called this system “the Word,” drawing on the tradition of African mystical healing and Paulo Freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed.”²⁴ Lawrence’s epistemology prioritizes racial subjectivity, narrative, emotion, and revisionism, uniting Marxian theory and praxis toward the goal of “liberation.”²⁵ He embraced a “positioned perspective” and told his colleagues they must “learn to privilege their own perspectives and those of other outsiders,” self-consciously elevating the “victim perspective” over the “perpetrator perspective.”²⁶ This functioned as a reversal: knowledge is reduced to power, and provides the critical race theorists with a new basis for overturning the existing hierarchy. In practice, the victim becomes the new source of authority—and his subjective feelings must be validated.

Lawrence illustrated this principle with an example that has now become a cliché. He recounts the story of a black female colleague who complained about an assigned reading, telling him: “I am offended. Therefore, these materials are offensive.” For Lawrence, this was a revelation. “It is these words that are revolutionary,” he wrote. “The [colleague] has done much more than offer a different perspective on the materials. She has given her/our perspective authority, and in doing so she has shown us that we can do the same. . . . By embracing a positioned perspective, this gifted practitioner of the Word reallocated the power to define what is real.”²⁷

This is the nebulous epistemological foundation of critical race theory: personal offense becomes objective reality; evidence gives way to ideology; identity replaces rationality as the basis of intellectual authority.

Lawrence concluded his theory of knowledge with a reprise of the Marxist dictate that the proper measurement of an activist philosophy is not whether it approaches the truth, but, in Lawrence’s phrase, “the degree to which the effort serves the cause of liberation.”²⁸ In other words, in a world where truth does not exist, all that is left is power—and the critical race theorists intended to take it.

The second key element of critical race theory, which builds on the foundation of racial reasoning, is the concept of “intersectionality.” The simplest way to explain intersectionality is that it expands the Marxist oppressor-oppressed binary into a finely graded, multivariate hierarchy of oppression. The concept had already been formulated in rudimentary terms by Angela Davis in Women, Race, & Class, which sought to address overlapping systems of oppression, but the critical race theorists took it a step further. In a pair of essays, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” and “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Kimberlé Crenshaw turned Angela Davis’s original insight into a multisyllabic Latinate term—intersectionality—which provided a single point of reference and gave it the perception of intellectual heft.

Crenshaw begins by inviting the reader to contemplate the full hierarchy of oppression through metaphor. “Imagine a basement which contains all people who are disadvantaged on the basis of race, sex, class, sexual preference, age and/or physical ability. These people are stacked—feet standing on shoulders—with those on the bottom being disadvantaged by the full array of factors, up to the very top, where the heads of all those disadvantaged by a singular factor brush up against the ceiling,” she wrote. “In efforts to correct some aspects of domination, those above the ceiling admit from the basement only those who can say that ‘but for’ the ceiling, they too would be in the upper room. A hatch is developed through which those placed immediately below can crawl. Yet this hatch is generally available only to those who—due to the singularity of their burden and their otherwise privileged position relative to those below—are in the position to crawl through. Those who are multiply-burdened are generally left below unless they can somehow pull themselves into the groups that are permitted to squeeze through the hatch.”²⁹

For Crenshaw, the figure hovering above the basement ceiling—the affluent, able-bodied, heterosexual, white male—is the ultimate oppressor, who has the power to admit and to exclude those below him. He has created a system of laws, norms, and values that pit the black woman at the bottom of the heap of human bodies. This presents the black woman with a gauntlet of hardships, from racial discrimination to sexual violence, but also gives her a near-magical status within the discipline of critical race theory. Following critical race theory’s elevation of the “victim perspective” as a source of authority, the doctrine of intersectionality gives the marginalized black woman the ultimate authority: her word is “the Word.”

The goal for Crenshaw was to create a more durable basis for political action, turning intersectionality into a more sophisticated method of identity politics. “Identity continues to be a site of resistance for members of different subordinated groups,” Crenshaw wrote. “At this point in history, a strong case can be made that the most critical resistance strategy for disempowered groups is to occupy and defend a politics of social location rather than to vacate and destroy it.”³⁰ In practice, the critical race theorists did not want to transcend identity in pursuit of universal values. They wanted to wield identity in pursuit of left-wing political power.

For Crenshaw, the lodestar for this new politics was the marginalized black woman, who represents a unitary embodiment of the oppressed—and, by the logic of intersectionality, a formula for restructuring society along every axis of oppression. For the marginalized black woman, anti-racism was insufficient, because it did not address her sex. Feminism was insufficient because it did not address her race. And anti-capitalism was insufficient because it did not address her identity at all. Unlike the older theories of identity politics, Crenshaw’s unitary theory of oppression required a unitary method of revolt, liberating the marginalized black woman along each axis of identity simultaneously.

Politically, Crenshaw’s innovation was that her theory of intersectionality provided the basis for a new revolutionary Subject, far beyond Marx’s white male proletariat and Marcuse’s white-students-and-black-ghetto coalition. In Crenshaw’s vision, the new constellation of oppressions—the woman, the minority, the homosexual, the disabled—could be aggregated into a political majority, which, despite superficial differences, represented the crush of flesh at the bottom of the basement, teeming with grievances and ready to revolt.

The final key element of critical race theory is critical race praxis, or the application of the theory to practical politics. Crenshaw and her colleagues explicitly adopted Marx’s famous dictum in the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach that the purpose of philosophy is not to interpret the world, but to change it.³¹ “Unlike some academic disciplines, critical race theory contains an activist dimension. It tries not only to understand our social situation but to change it,” Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic announced in the opening pages of Critical Race Theory: An Introduction.³² “Street activists, for their part, need new theories to challenge a social order that treats minority communities and the poor so badly. By the same token, theorists need the infusion of energy that comes from exposure to real-world problems, both as a galvanizing force for scholarship and as a reality test for their writing. As for criticizing the existing system, the crits respond that they are indeed at work developing a vision to replace it.”³³

The critical race theorists based their political strategy on the work of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist who pioneered the concept of “cultural hegemony” and argued that modern left-wing revolutions could succeed through a “war of position” against the establishment. “Critical scholars derive their vision of legal ideology in part from the work of Antonio Gramsci,” wrote Crenshaw in The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. “In examining domination as a combination of physical coercion and ideological control, Gramsci articulated the concept of hegemony, the means by which a system of attitudes and beliefs, permeating both popular consciousness and the ideology of elites, reinforces existing social arrangements and convinces the dominated classes that the existing order is inevitable.”³⁴

In the United States, Crenshaw continued, the existing hegemony was the regime of “white supremacy,” which, even after the fall of slavery and Jim Crow, had “been submerged in popular consciousness,” but still provided the basic structure of racial domination.³⁵ According to the narrative of critical race theory, American institutions perpetuated this invisible white supremacy while mystifying it through appeals to merit, neutrality, colorblindness, and equal protection under the law—all of which were illusions designed to protect the “racist ideology” and material interests of the ruling class.³⁶

The solution, for Crenshaw, was not to engage in direct revolution against the state, as the black militant movement had attempted to do in the previous generation, but to subvert the culture-forming institutions from within. In other words, the ideology of Eldridge Cleaver had a better chance at success with the strategy of Derrick Bell, who had gained the prestige of elite institutions and manipulated their internal logic to suit his political objectives.

“The struggle of blacks, like that of all subordinated groups, is a struggle . . . to manipulate elements of the dominant ideology in order to transform the experience of domination,” Crenshaw explained. “Gramsci called this struggle a ‘war of position’ and he regarded it as the most appropriate strategy for change in Western societies.”³⁷ This strategy, for Crenshaw, provided the most powerful method for seeding critical race theory into the American regime and creating a “counterhegemony” within the American power structure. And the critical race theorists, who by the mid-1990s had secured professorships at prestigious law schools around the country, were in the perfect position to execute it.

Mari Matsuda, another law professor who attended the founding conference on critical race theory, proposed the tactical methods for waging the “war of position.”

In an essay for The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, Matsuda rallied the entire intellectual substructure of critical race theory—from the logic of the racial reasoning to the authority of the intersectional Subject to the Gramscian war of position—in service of this political vision. She called on the critical race theorists to “[look] to the bottom,” adopt “the perspective of those who have seen and felt the falsity of the liberal promise,” and rely on the marginalized to “[define] the elements of justice.” She believed that the new representatives of the oppressed, which Gramsci had called “organic intellectuals,” had the power to subvert the existing legal and political order that “serves to legitimate existing maldistributions of wealth and power” and to rebuild society according to “the actual experience, history, culture, and intellectual tradition of people of color in America.”³⁸

For Matsuda and the critical race theorists, the endpoint of the law was not to achieve universal equality, which they dismissed as an abstraction, but to orient the machine of the state toward the benefit of the particular flesh-and-blood communities that comprised the intersectional coalition. The ideal outcome, Matsuda wrote, was for “the victim’s interpretation” of the Constitution to achieve hegemony, so that “the promise of liberty” would mean “freedom from public and private racism, freedom from inequalities of wealth distribution, and freedom from domination by dynasties.”³⁹ From the beginning to the beyond, critical race theory represented the next turn in the dialectic, promising a process of “fundamental change” that could, at last, usher in “a utopian conception of a world” liberated from past oppressions.⁴⁰

In a remarkably short time period, the critical race theorists had cobbled together their ideology, which they saw as “fuel for social transformation”⁴¹ that began in the university and moved outward through elite activism. As their master Derrick Bell had once observed: “Critical race theory recognizes that revolutionizing a culture begins with the radical assessment of it.”⁴² The young scholars were ready to commit to “a program of scholarly resistance” that, they hoped, would finally “lay the groundwork for wide-scale resistance.”⁴³

* * *

The critical race theorists had set their initial plans in private, but as soon as they began publishing, their movement came under immediate fire from prominent scholars. Critics on the Right and the Left attacked the critical race theorists’ victim epistemology, unwarranted pessimism, and partisan political strategy.

The most withering critiques, however, came from black scholars and civil rights leaders.

The first shot came from one of Derrick Bell’s colleagues at Harvard Law School, Randall Kennedy, who wrote a highly critical 1989 essay in the Harvard Law Review questioning the intellectual foundations of the new discipline.⁴⁴ Kennedy argued that the critical race theorists had failed to substantiate their claims of representing the “victim perspective” in academia and of producing racially distinctive scholarship. The critical race theorists had attempted to bolster their “standing” by claiming the mantle of oppression, but, according to Kennedy, a closer examination of the evidence suggested that minority scholars did not suffer meaningful exclusion at law schools. Their limited representation could be better explained, among other reasons, by the limited pool of qualified candidates.

Furthermore, Kennedy attacked the notion that “because of their minority status and the experience of racial victimization that attaches to that status, people of color offer valuable and special perspectives or voices, that, if recognized, will enrich legal academic discourse.”⁴⁵ In reality, the critical race theorists “[failed] to show the newness of the ‘new knowledge’ and the difference that distinguishes the ‘different voices.’”⁴⁶ Kennedy argued that skin color alone was not an automatic indicator of wisdom or an entitlement to special standing. The critical race theorists had attempted to reduce the world into a crude racial binary, which collapsed meaningful distinctions between individuals who might share the same racial ancestry. As Kennedy pointed out, their analysis “wraps in one garment of racial victimization the black law professor [and] the black, unemployed, uneducated captive of the ghetto” and, even worse, assumes that all members of a racial category must hold the same opinion.⁴⁷

Kennedy had laid bare an embarrassing truth: the critical race theorists crusaded for “diversity” but treated racial groups as monoliths. The discipline did not transcend racial stereotypes, it simply inverted them: minorities were assumed to be wise, disadvantaged, and deserving; whites were assumed to be sterile, imperial, and oppressive. Race became a proxy for worth and group identity became the new criterion of moral and intellectual evaluation.

Kennedy flatly rejected this logic of racial standing—and, along with it, the logic of racial reasoning—as poisonous to academia and, by extension, to society. “Widespread application of [the critical race theorists’] concept of standing would likely be bad for minority scholars,” he wrote. “It would be bad for them because it would be bad for all scholars. It would be bad for all scholars because status-based criteria for intellectual standing are anti-intellectual in that they subordinate ideas and craft to racial status.”⁴⁸

At its inception, Kennedy saw the ambitions of the new discipline—to establish a method of obtaining institutional power through racial manipulation—and warned against it.⁴⁹ He viewed the reduction of individuals to racial categories as an ugly resurrection of the notion that “race is destiny.”⁵⁰ And he considered the concepts of “whiteness” and “blackness” as hopelessly vague, ill-motivated, and hostile to the individual and to universal values.

Kennedy’s work caused immediate conflict. While Kennedy was working on a draft of the essay, Derrick Bell personally intervened, telling his younger colleague that he should not publish it because it would betray his obligation to his racial and ideological tribe. When Kennedy ignored him and published the critique in the Harvard Law Review, Bell exploded with acrimony. He attacked Kennedy publicly, saying that his colleague served “the role of academic minstrel” and that the positive reception to Kennedy’s work demonstrated that “the media is ready to accord Kennedy that special celebrity status available to any black willing to speak for whites . . . who are unwilling to criticize blacks for the record.”⁵¹

Other scholars took note. To question the logic of racial reasoning would invite accusations of racism, professional ostracism, and a campaign of character assassination—even if those scholars were black. Years later, after Bell’s death, Kennedy acknowledged this dynamic in a retrospective, which offered a grudging respect to Bell, but concluded that he “was drawn to grand generalities that crumple under skeptical probing” and, ultimately, was consumed by his anger, bitterness, and disappointments.⁵²

The second significant broadside against Bell and his students’ theory of racial pessimism came from another one of his colleagues, Leroy Clark, who worked as a civil rights attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, collaborated with Martin Luther King Jr. on the Poor People’s Campaign, and then became a law professor at Catholic University of America.⁵³ Whereas Randall Kennedy attacked the intellectual foundations of racial reasoning and victim epistemology, Clark attacked Bell’s historical account of racism in America, which, he argued, was detached from the facts and harmful to black self-improvement.

Having observed Bell’s bitter reaction to criticism, Clark opened his critique with a note of caution. “I write this article in ambivalence, but with a sense of urgency. The ambivalence comes from criticizing the work of a one-time working colleague, who gained my sincere respect because of his unquestioned concern for the black plight,” he wrote. “I do not doubt that Professor Bell has written, as he always does, with honesty. But it is precisely because he is a man of profound integrity, a man labeled the ‘founder of Critical Race Theory,’ that his pronouncements may have an unprecedented powerful influence, especially on developing minority scholars. . . . The urgency, therefore, comes from my sense that Professor Bell’s work propagates a damaging and dampening message which must be confronted and rejected if we are to fashion our future creatively.”⁵⁴

After graciously setting the stage, Clark went after Bell’s relentlessly negative perception of American history and his argument that racism is permanent, indestructible, and all-powerful in society. The truth, Clark pointed out, was that, throughout American history, many whites fought selflessly for racial equality. In the antebellum period, white abolitionists fought to prohibit slavery out of moral and religious conviction. During the civil rights movement, white activists worked hand in hand with black activists to end the practice of segregation and state-sanctioned racism.

Bell had attempted to explain away any expression of white virtue as cloaked self-interest, but, according to Clark, a basic historical study of the Civil War and of the civil rights movement, in which both he and Bell had participated, left no doubt: white Americans could transcend their own narrow interests and contribute toward the realization of black freedom. Contrary to Bell’s dismal characterizations, Clark maintained that “white abolitionists saw the Confederates as the ‘Space Traders’ of their day” and that, when he and Bell were colleagues at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, at least one-third of the lawyers on their team were white.⁵⁵

Likewise, Clark rejected Bell’s insistence that contemporary blacks were worse off than at any time since slavery.

Blacks, Clark argued, had, in fact, made a “profound qualitative leap toward freedom” at each stage of American history, from abolition to Reconstruction to the Great Migration to the civil rights era.⁵⁶ He pointed to a range of historical evidence that contradicted Bell’s theory of permanent racism and, instead, made the case for continued progress. In their lifetime, Clark wrote, black poverty had declined by 60 percent, three-fifths of blacks had moved into the middle class, black women had arrived at income parity with white women, and the number of black elected officials had grown from a few dozen in 1940 to 6,800 in 1988. Quoting the economist Peter Drucker, Clark summarized the case for racial optimism: “In the fifty years since the Second World War the economic position of African-Americans in America has improved faster than that of any other group in American social history—or in the social history of any country.”⁵⁷

This is not to say that Clark was a Pollyanna. He acknowledged the persistent challenges for black Americans, but maintained that they could not be attributed to racism as an all-powerful and unitary cause. As Clark observed, many of the social problems that were most pronounced in poor black communities had also spread to poor white communities. The cause of social disadvantage could not be reduced to the single variable of race, but must include the full range of economic and cultural factors that lead to inequalities both across and within racial groups.

There is a sense of personal anguish in Clark’s writing. He was pained by the fact that his old comrade had lost his way, allowing himself to drift into the paranoid fantasy that contemporary whites were busy plotting “a future holocaust for African-Americans.”⁵⁸ Clark saw something deeper: Bell’s “racial realism” was, in truth, a form of racial nihilism. His protests were not a demonstration of moral heroism, but a form of narcissism and moral grandstanding.

Clark respectfully chastised his former colleague for abandoning the key lesson of the civil rights era—that broad-based, multiracial coalitions were essential for black progress—in favor of a selfish and self-fulfilling attitude of pessimism. “Professor Bell does not offer a single programmatic approach toward changing the circumstance of blacks. He presents only startling, unanalyzed prophecies of doom, which will easily garner attention from a controversy-hungry media,” Clark wrote, barely concealing his frustration.⁵⁹ “Bell’s ‘analysis’ is really only accusation and ‘harassing white folks,’ and is undermining and destructive. There is no love—except for his own group—and there is a constricted reach for an understanding of whites. There is only rage and perplexity. No bridges are built—only righteousness is being sold.”⁶⁰

The final critique of critical race theory during its initial formation came from Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor of African-American studies who arrived at Harvard in 1991, as Derrick Bell was engaging in his academic strike. Gates, who would later become the much-celebrated chair of Harvard’s Afro-American Studies Department, attacked Bell from the outset. He said that Bell’s protest was “a very courageous and dramatic thing to do,”⁶¹ but condemned Bell’s endorsement of Louis Farrakhan and hinted that Bell might be enabling the “black demagogues and pseudo-scholars” who refused to clearly condemn anti-Semitism within the black intelligentsia.⁶²

Bell, in turn, was furious. He lashed out at Gates in the New Republic and the New York Times,⁶³ saying that his Harvard colleague was the equivalent of men such as Clarence Thomas, Shelby Steele, and Thomas Sowell, who criticized left-wing black intellectuals in order to enhance their standing and “serve as a comfort to whites who are upset.”⁶⁴

But Gates was just getting started.

Later that year, Gates penned an essay for the New Republic that leveled an even more serious criticism against the professor and his young disciples. Gates blasted the ideology of critical race theory, drawing a sharp contrast between the civil rights movement, which regarded civil rights and civil liberties as mutually beneficial, and critical race activism, which had abandoned faith in the principles of the Constitution and argued in favor of the government regulating, restricting, and punishing individuals for vague notions of “hate speech.” The critical race theorists, Gates observed, imagined themselves the victims of institutional racism, pervasive bias, academic exclusion, and subtle oppression. But this was an illusion.

In truth, Gates argued, the critical race theorists—law professors in elite universities—were not members of a persecuted class. They were members of a privileged class with significant institutional support. They could appeal to the institutions for protection against “hate speech” because they knew the institutions were likely to side with them. The critical race theorists used their identity as the “victim” in order to exploit the moral power of the oppressed minority, while in reality they represented an ideological majority that sought to cement its own power. “Why would you entrust authority with enlarged powers of regulating the speech of unpopular minorities, unless you were confident that the unpopular minorities would be racists, not blacks?” Gates asked rhetorically.⁶⁵

One by one, Gates cataloged the flaws in the critical race theorists’ ideology and the problems that would emerge from their ideal regime. He argued that their political project, which would involve regulating expressions of speech, would replace politics with an unstable form of psychotherapy. The critical race theorists had based their theory of knowledge on the shaky ground of radical subjectivity, which elevated their perspective as the only valid point of judgment and then demanded that it be turned into positive law.

Gates predicted that this approach would lead to absurd inquisitions, empower the most hysterical and punitive elements of the bureaucracy, and enthrone “a vocabulary of trauma and abuse, in which the verbal and physical forms are seen as equivalent.” He cited an example from the University of Connecticut, which had banned individuals from “actions that undermined the ‘security or self-esteem’ of persons or groups” and, at the same time, also banned “attributing objections to any of the above actions to ‘hypersensitivity’ of the targeted individual or group.” In other words, a catch-22: the enforcers of the victim perspective determine guilt and any attempt at defense is considered further proof of wrongdoing.⁶⁶

More importantly, Gates argued that the critical race theorists would turn racism into a mirage. The critical race theorists had focused all of their attention on the preoccupations of academia and abstract condemnations of elite speech and behavior while offering very little to say on the real-world plight of the black underclass. “The problem may be that . . . the continuing immiseration of large segments of black America cannot be erased simply through better racial attitudes. Poverty, white and black, can take on a life of its own, to the point that removing the conditions that caused it can do little to alleviate it,” Gates wrote. “Rather than responding to the grim new situation with new and subtler modes of socioeconomic analysis, [the critical race theorists] have finessed the gap between rhetoric and reality by forging new and subtler definitions of the word ‘racism.’ Hence a new model of institutional racism is one that can operate in the absence of actual racists. By redefining our terms, we can always say of the economic gap between black and white America: the problem is still racism . . . and, by stipulation, it would be true. But the grip of this vocabulary has tended to foreclose the more sophisticated models of political economy that we so desperately need.”⁶⁷

The critical race theorists had substituted verbalism for meaning, and symbolism for substance. If they were to attain power, Gates warned, they would sacrifice liberty for a phantom notion of equality, which, in the end, might end up destroying both. Contrary to the activists of the civil rights movement, the aim of the critical race theorists was “not to resist power, but to enlist power.”⁶⁸ The result would be a system of manipulation that uses guilt, shame, and intricate linguistic and psychological traps to maintain social control.

These three critiques—from Kennedy, Clark, and Gates, all published by 1995—represented a significant intellectual challenge to critical race theory. They did not, however, represent a significant political challenge. One by one, Bell and his disciples dispatched their black critics through smears and character assassination. Bell called his black opponents “minstrels” and accused them of participating in “the slave masters’ practice of elevating to overseer and other positions of quasi-power those slaves willing to mimic the masters’ views.”⁶⁹ His students reproduced this strategy in subtler therapeutic language, diagnosing black critics as suffering from the disease of “internalized racial inferiority.”

The critical race theorists had built their philosophy on the unstable foundation of postmodernism, designated themselves the avatars of the oppressed, and created a manipulative political praxis in search of a nebulous and always-failing utopia. All of this was obvious to the early critics. Yet, despite these glaring flaws, the critical race theorists managed to vanquish their opposition one by one and begin the process of installing their ideology in elite enclaves. The real brilliance of critical race theory was not intellectual, but tactical. The “activist scholars” learned how to wield the politics of race in elite milieus and use it as a fulcrum for accumulating power.

After the ideological foundations were set, the critical race theorists turned to the next phase of their campaign: conquering the institutions.