Thanks, I do know what Critical Theory is and what Critical Race Theory is. I study critical Theory in graduate school, and it applies to different genres. Critical Race Theory stems from critical theory practices, developed out of the synchronic linguistic theory when Ferdinand de Saussure’s lectures were transcribed in the early 1900s, separating the objective abstract theory of language a system that can be studied and understood only in a cross section of time. The sign/symbol language was began to be used widely, and structural linguistics was born. Levi-Strauss took up the mantel and applied it as structural anthropology, as did many others, applying it to literature, sociology, philosophy, and structuralist Marxist studies. Poststructuralism was born afterwards and made popular under the rubric of deconstruction by Jacques Derrida, one of leading practitioners, largely in the 1960s and 70s. The term deconstruction used widely in the media today relates nothing to the term created by Derrida and others, and simply means “to analyze” or take apart and look at the pieces. Nothing to do with deconstruction itself, which is largely a phenomenological study that examines the structuralist assumptions that sprang our of structural linguistics but not attacking the actual study of linguistics which is the abstract study of language and must be structural.
However, CRT or critical race theory developed as a structural idea of law that studies how laws made by U.S. legislatures or interpreted by judges has decades lasting effects on blacks in particularly and federal laws are particularly hard to undo. It was developed in the early 1970s at Columbia law school I believe. This long last effect accounts for the structural problems lingering on long after a practice like Jim Crow or redlining is brought into being by lawmakers, hence the systemic racism, rather than just ‘plain racism.’ Systemic racism doesn’t need marching and hoods and cross burning as nooses. It manifests itself ‘calmly’ as laws that are passed by a democratic body and difficult to undo. Plain racism is an angry individual or group of individuals who manifest open racism through comments, nooses, and actions. Individuals can change and regret their actions. We would hope most of them would, though that usually is not the case. But systemic racism continues to propagate differences through structurally treatment of groups of people based on race, depriving opportunities of fair housing or fair voting, perpetuating the feeling in individuals that something “must” be wrong with a certain group, like blacks, because the government made a law banning them from a certain neighborhood, or worse (such depriving them of citizenship and equal rights during the years of slavery, even though the Constitution and declaration give rights to all humans equally). But yes, I am interested in your interpretation of CRT. There is still much to clear up and learn. I wish you the best.
