Chuck Darwin<p>Tim Golden: <br>Your use of the word “emancipatory” is compelling in that CRT is engaged with American history, <br>in particular the history of American chattel slavery. </p><p>Before elaborating on this point, it is important to note that there are various iterations of CRT, <br>which relate to different ethnicities who find themselves at the bottom of the “white-over-color ascendancy”<br> (racial hierarchy with whites at the top) <br>that Delgado and Stefancic reference in the lead-up to your question. </p><p>For example, there are Asian, Latinx and Indigenous forms of CRT. </p><p>And there is also an African American iteration, <br>which is the one that I will be discussing here.</p><p>Again, your use of the word “emancipatory” resonates with American history <br>and its enslavement of Black people, <br>and hearkens back to the formation of the American republic <br>and its central founding document, <br>the United States Constitution. </p><p>Drafted in 1787 and eventually ratified through a series of compromises that maintained slavery for the foreseeable future <br>— at least until 1808 <br>— CRT, in its African American iteration, with Derrick Bell as its principal expositor, <br>has argued that those compromises set in motion a machinery of government that is dangerously and perpetually compromised <br>in its tolerance of anti-Black racism. </p><p>CRT’s critical and emancipatory aims, then, are to show how American law and politics maintain systems of racial oppression.</p><p>CRT does this in at least two ways. </p><p>⭐️First, by showing how the compromises at the American founding have set the tone for a morally lax American political ethos <br>which benefits African Americans, <br>not because of any genuine recognition of moral harm done to them, <br>but rather because their interests coincidentally converge with those of American whites. </p><p>This is what Bell referred to as <br>“interest convergence,” <br>and it is a sort of utilitarian moral calculus <br>less concerned with doing what is right <br>and more concerned with doing what is expedient.</p><p>For example, President Abraham Lincoln, Bell would argue, did not emancipate <br>— there’s that word again <br>— the slaves because it was morally right, <br>but rather because the Union had to be restored. </p><p>And President Barack Obama was not elected because America had suddenly become any less racist in its view of Black people, <br>but rather because so many upper-middle class whites were bleeding large sums of money from their retirement accounts in the financial crisis of 2008, </p><p>and because Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin appeared to them to be incompetent to handle the fledgling economy. </p><p>I have written of this in the introduction to my book on Derrick Bell.</p><p>⭐️A second way that CRT advances its critical and emancipatory aims is through <br>a trenchant critique of abstraction in American constitutional law. </p><p>CRT, through the work of Bell and others, has demonstrated how the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, <br>ratified for the purpose of helping newly freed slaves shed the legacy of slavery, <br>is now interpreted in ways that make such remediation illegal. </p><p>CRT points out how, <br>through an abstract understanding of “equality,” <br>liberal democratic theory, <br>with its emphasis on a symmetrical concept of “rights,” <br>generates absurd notions of “reverse racism,” <br>in which whites can now claim legal harm pursuant to a constitutional amendment that was ratified, <br>not to protect whites, <br>but rather to remediate the harm that whites have done. </p><p>CRT’s work in law is thus critical and emancipatory in its exposure of racial oppression in American constitutional law.</p><p> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Black" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Black</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/History" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>History</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/CRT" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>CRT</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Derrick" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Derrick</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Bell" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Bell</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Tim" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Tim</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Golden" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Golden</span></a></p>