Abstract
In the last decade or so, George Floyd’s institutional murder and the Black Lives Matter movement have brought back the discussion around race and racial injustice to the forefront. This movement was built on the shoulders of the 1960s–1970s Black rights movement in broadening and widening the genealogy of racism. In the current phase, the movement was effective and structural partly due to the advent of social media and also an increased collective consciousness. Amidst these, race has received enormous traction in the form of books. To name a few, The hate u give by Angie Thomas (2017), White fragility by Robin DiAngelo (2018), Back to Black: Retelling Black radicalism for the 21st century by Kehinde Andrews (2018) and Caste: The origins of our ciscontents by Isabel Wilkerson (2020).
The Origins of Critical Theory is one such intervention for understanding race, racism and racial inequalities from a humanist point of view. The term ‘CRT’ originated in the conversations between Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Stephanie L. Phillips and Teresa ‘Teri’ Miller during the chilling winters at the University of Wisconsin. It has emerged in their own words ‘as part of resistance to retrenchment’ (p. 142). The authors Aja Y. Martinez and Robert O. Smith attempted to address racial inequalities through the individual and institutional connections between race and law. Historically, law as an institution played a pertinent role in American politics. What this book also did was to discuss issues such as slavery, colonialism, capitalism and Marxism in connection with race and the people connected with CRT. It has slightly moved out from the concurrent scholarship by presenting racial injustice through a three-pronged analysis—the state, law and people. In doing so, it weaves the most discussed ideas of the 20th and 21st centuries. In a nutshell, this book redefines CRT as a ‘new approach to legal theory pioneered by minority scholars and practitioners, often through the device of either true stories or personal anecdotes or fictional tales, discussing the many ways in which race and law affect each other’ (p. 163).
Philosopher Cornell West (1995) defines CRT as an intellectual movement focusing on both our contemporary times and a long tradition of human resistance and liberation. While it is true, CRT also connects theory and experience, which is akin to the Dalit movement in India. Social inequalities need to be addressed not just at the theoretical level but importantly by exploring experiences. What CRT does in the USA is to begin the exercise by confronting American law’s complicity in upholding White supremacy. While doing so, it has deployed a hermeneutical approach, critically interpreting the law by examining the entire edifice of contemporary legal thought and doctrine. This echoes Dr Ambedkar’s (2023) critical engagement with Hindu ritual texts, particularly the Bhagavat Gita.
Any movement, irrespective of its scale, requires a strong anchor. This book identifies such anchors and chronicles their lives. The strength behind CRT, Derrick Bell (Cobb, 2021), Richard Delgado, Jean Stefancic, Crenshaw and many others and their lives were discussed humanely. While doing so, it addresses propaganda, such as that ‘CRT teaches that whites are incapable of righteous actions on race’ (p. 63). This argument is a redundant yet pertinent one. It echoes in various other domains too. For instance, the Dalit question in India. To fight against the Brahmanical ideology, how far can Dalits rely on the Brahmins? Do Dalits invoke similar apprehensions, or do they include non-Dalits, including Brahmins, in their fight for self-respect and social justice? While reading the book, one could draw many comparative questions.
In one way, this book reorients American historiography by inserting CRT and presenting the movement as collective courage. The courage was cultivated in challenging the constitution through legal knowledge. It was the intellectual community that brought out the struggles of Aboriginals in Australia; in India, the struggles of Dalits were brought out by political representation, whereas in the USA, the plight of Black people was articulated by the legal scholars who challenged the cleavages within the American Constitution (Chakrabarty, 2007). What one could see as the limitation in the CRT movement is an anchor like Ambedkar, who not only understood law and scriptures but also executed them through his active political life.
Criticisms against movements are inevitable; CRT is not insusceptible. For instance, it is another name for Marxist theory; it is contaminating the brains of young children, promoting ethnonationalist responses (p. 2) and bad-faith attacks. Yet it withstood these conservative attacks to build the tenets of social justice and accessibility. In recent times, having critical thinking is a crime. The state being repressive is a recent phenomenon across the globe. The totalitarian regimes are rapidly taking over the mantle. In India, those who raise questions for the betterment of society, addressing the ailments in everyday life, were called ‘Urban Naxals’ (Raina, 2025).
While writing the history of a movement, the presence of women is always bleak. Either they are not properly represented, or an insufficient proportion of attention is given, even if the movement aims for greater values. This happens because of the gendered, patriarchal mindset. The CRT story is slightly different. This book documents the gender dimension organically, not as a subtext; it runs throughout the book as a main story. It can be about Behonor McDonald, Bell’s first wife, Jewel Hairston, who shaped Black uplift and self-determination, participated directly in the civil rights movements in the 1960s, and went on to build the critical race consciousness of the post-civil rights era (p. 24). Delgado and Stefancic (2023), with her ‘reader-friendly language’, contributed immensely to the CRT, that too without buzzwords and complicated jargon.
Methodologically, the CRT has given significant inputs. For instance, Delgado’s approach—counter-story—is a form of legal storytelling. This method discusses ‘matters of law and society in a way that is conversational and intended to be accessible to general readers’ (p. 67). Bell, on the other hand, tried to break the traditional, formal pattern of writing with his ‘unorthodox epic narrative consisting of four sci-fi/fantasy chronicles featuring intense debates between a fictionalized version of Bell and his newly debuted heroine-protagonist called Geneva Crenshaw’ (pp. 76–77). His first major pathbreaking intervention into the world of CRT was a foreword to The Harvard Law Review magazine. It was here that he mentions the ‘interest convergence’, where he mentions that the Whites’ perception about Black people is not because of their moral awakening but sheer interest convergence and Cold War pragmatism (Cobb, 2021).
This book would be a great source for students and researchers who are part of traditional disciplines, such as sociology and anthropology, and other such social sciences and humanities, as well as newer disciplines or fields such as critical caste studies, development studies, gender studies and women’s studies, or those doing research in multi- and interdisciplinary programmes. This book would be particularly useful for scholars working around themes such as social justice, genealogy of movement, race and other such socially relevant themes.