Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 41, No.

1, 2007

REVIEW ARTICLE

The Relevance of Critical Race Theory

to Educational Theory and Practice

JEANNE M. POWERS

Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic.

New York, New York University Press. 2001. Pp. xi1167. Pbk d12.50, $18.00.

The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming

Democracy. Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres. Cambridge, MA, Harvard
University Press. 2002. Pp. 1–392. Pbk d11.95, $18.50.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has its origins in legal analysis

but increasingly has been used by educational researchers to
analyse the continued salience of institutional racism in
educational settings. After providing a brief overview of the
history of CRT and the educational issues addressed by
critical race theorists, I review two books that explicitly
engage critical race theory (CRT). Delgado and Stefancic’s
(2001) primer on the CRT literature provides an important
backdrop for situating Guinier and Torres’ (2002) ambitious
argument for building grassroots social movements around
the concept of political race.

THE CENTRAL IDEAS AND ORIGINS OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY

The title of this article refers to the two main goals of Critical Race Theory
(CRT). Critical race theory aims to challenge conventional accounts of
educational and other institutions and the social processes that occur
within them. In addition, the analyses associated with the critical race
theory movement are also coupled to an activist agenda. In Critical Race
Theory: An Introduction, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic provide
a primer for this rapidly expanding body of literature. In The Miner’s
Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy, Lani
Guinier and Gerald Torres use CRT (and the social and political theories
that shaped it) to build a conceptual rationale for what they argue is a
crucial political project, which they term political race, one that ‘begins
from the ground up, starting with race in all its complexity, and then builds
cross-racial relationships through race and with race to issues of class and

r 2007 The Author

Journal compilation r 2007 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Published by Blackwell
Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
152 J. M. Powers

gender in order to make democracy real’ (p. 10). While both books
specifically focus on the US context, the analysis and insights of these
authors are relevant for understanding and analysing race relations in other
contexts.
Education, writ broadly, is at the heart of critical race theory both in its
origins and some of its central issues of concern, a point implicitly
highlighted by Angela Harris’ introduction to Delgado and Stefancic’s
text. Harris writes of her experiences as a law school student at the
University of Chicago and as one of the small group of students of colour
in her law school class. The year before she entered law school, she was a
graduate student in the social sciences living in an activist student
community in which she and her colleagues protested apartheid, engaged
in readings and discussions of the ideas of Third World feminists, and
challenged the university administration to provide programmes and
resources targeted at students of colour. In her law school classes, the
‘lively discourse on racial-ethnic relations, both domestic and interna-
tional’ she had participated in over the prior year was completely absent
from the curriculum; instead ‘[t]here was only one Law, a law that in its
universal majesty applied to everyone without regard to race, colour,
gender, or creed’ (p. xviii).
Harris’ narrative poignantly illustrates how damaging ‘official knowl-
edge’ (Apple, 2000) can be to students of colour when their life
experiences and perspectives are erased from the curriculum.1 Yet Harris
also links her own story to a broader systemic issue, a move that is a key
feature of CRT analyses. While many areas of the law such as
immigration law, poverty law and criminal law have a profound impact
on communities of colour, in the mid-1980s when Harris was attending a
top-ranked law school ‘there was, seemingly, no language in which to
embark on a race-based, systematic critique of legal reasoning and legal
institutions themselves’ (p. xix). The impact of this silence is all the more
profound if we consider that graduates of the top law schools are well-
placed for careers that will allow them to have some measure of influence
over the legal system (i.e. in teaching positions at top-ranked law schools,
judgeships, and partnerships in the most prestigious law firms). At the
time, CRT was in its early stages of development. Two of the foundational
articles in the CRT movement had only recently been published (Freeman,
1978; Bell, 1980; see also Bell, 1976) and the events that propelled CRT
as a social movement within law schools were unfolding. In 1981, Derrick
Bell, one of the founding scholars of the movement, was denied tenure by
Harvard Law School, sparking a student boycott and the organisation of an
alternative course on race and the law (Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, and
Thomas, 1995). Cho and Westley (2000) argue that the anti-racist student
movements that began in the late 1960s and continued through the 1970s
and the 1980s were also an important factor propelling the development of
CRT (see also Matsuda, 1996).
In the late 1980s, a national conference on Critical Race Theory
was held. By the mid-1990s, an increasing number of articles written
by scholars associated with the CRT movement were appearing in

r 2007 The Author

Journal compilation r 2007 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
 The Relevance of Critical Race Theory 153

mainstream law journals and a major anthology of CRT writings was

published (Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, and Thomas, 1995). Issues related
to education have been among the central topics considered by critical
race theorists including, but not limited to: the desegregation of public
education (e.g. Bell, 1980; Peller, 2002); language rights and bilingual
education (Martinez, 1994; Johnson and Martinez, 2000; Perea, 1992, 2004);
affirmative action (Gotanda, 1996; Kennedy, 1990; Harris, 2003); what
counts as official knowledge in the academy (Delgado, 1984, 1992; Culp,
1991); access to higher education (Roithmayr, 2000), diversity in higher
education (Moran, 2000); and analyses of the experiences of scholars of
colour in the academy (Harris, 1992). In 1995, Gloria Ladson-Billings and
William Tate wrote an influential article published in Teachers College
Record arguing for a critical race theory of education (Ladson-Billings and
Tate, 1995; see also Tate, 1997, and Ladson-Billings, 1998).
Ten years later, Ladson-Billings (2005) commented that while the
literature on CRT and education is ‘in its infancy’ it is also ‘a theoretical
treasure—a new scholarly covenant, if you will, that we as scholars are
still parsing and moving toward new exegesis’ (p. 119). Other education
scholars have applied the insights from CRT from the United States to
international contexts. For example, David Gillborn (2005) has argued that
while CRT is deeply grounded in the United States’ context, insights from
CRT are relevant for analysing recent education policy trends in England.
Similarly, Wing (2000) and other scholars have done important work
extending the analytic frame of CRT through Global Critical Race
Feminism (GCRF). More recently, Wing and Smith (2006) analyse the
French law that prohibits Muslim girls from wearing headscarves in
schools from a GCRF perspective.2

A PRIMER FOR STUDENTS

Given the rapid development of CRT and also its relevance outside of the
legal academy in education and the social sciences, a book to help
students—and in particular students without a background in law—
understand this complex and evolving literature is timely. In Critical Race
Theory: An Introduction, Delgado and Stefancic explain the ideas that
motivate CRT in clear and engaging prose. The authors also include short
excerpts from legal opinions to illustrate the ideas and concepts they are
discussing. Each of the seven main chapters in Delgado and Stefancic’s
book highlights important aspects of the CRT literature: key themes, the
central methods of CRT (legal story-telling and narrative analysis),
the CRT critique of power relationships within minority communities, the
CRT analysis of power, critiques of CRT and the CRT response, an
overview of the current state of the field and directions for the future. All
of the chapters provide a list of questions to provoke further thought or
discussion and a list of suggested readings related to the topic of each
chapter. Most chapters also contain suggested classroom exercises for
students and teachers.

r 2007 The Author

Journal compilation r 2007 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
154 J. M. Powers

My quibbles with Delgado and Stefancic’s otherwise important book

have less to do with its content per se than with its utility as a text for
students in an introductory course, which is clearly the authors’ goal.
Perhaps to make the text more accessible to readers, the authors have
omitted within-text citations and footnotes. While this makes the text
highly readable, it comes at the expense of references to both the research
studies they use to describe the state of race relations in the US (both past
and present) and the articles they discuss in their analysis of CRT. Many
students, and in particular those that enjoy the benefits of race and class
privilege and have not been exposed to critical analyses of race and class
inequality, may find it difficult to accept general statements that challenge
mainstream views without additional support in the form of statistics or, at
a minimum, citations for key sources. Similarly, while each chapter
contains a list of suggested readings, a student new to CRT who is
interested in exploring specific ideas more deeply may find it difficult to
match readings with concepts, except in the instances where specific
authors are highlighted in the text. Finally, an appendix providing a brief
overview of the issues being considered and the decisions reached by the
courts that correspond to the excerpts of judicial opinions included
throughout the text would help the beginning student better to navigate the
text and also to come away with a deeper understanding of the cases the
authors use as illustrations.

THE CENTRAL ROLE OF RACE IN CREATING A REVITALISED

DEMOCRACY
Yet taken alongside Guinier and Torres’ Miner’s Canary, Delgado and
Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory: An Introduction is an effective
companion text since it will help students situate Guinier and Torres’
complex and wide-ranging argument. Guinier and Torres propose a re-
visioning of American democracy, not one based on colour-blindness (the
dominant ideology in the United States about how race should function)
but one that takes seriously the challenges race has posed to American
democracy throughout its history. A corollary goal of Guinier and Torres’
project is to advance the broader project of critical race theory. They see
their work as rooted in CRT in important ways: in CRT’s emphasis on
analysing racial inequality in American society; and its emphasis on the
use of story-telling as a form of analysis. Yet, they also argue that CRT is
limited to the extent that its main focus is on changing legal institutions
and doctrine. While this is an important goal, Guinier and Torres believe
that this strategy will not result in substantive social change because legal
institutions and doctrine not only have helped to create but also continue
to support white racial solidarity and racial privilege.3 Thus in The
Miner’s Canary Guinier and Torres’ aim is to outline the theoretical and
conceptual foundations of a progressive social movement that is built from
the ground up in ‘small laboratories of democracy that exist below the

r 2007 The Author

Journal compilation r 2007 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
 The Relevance of Critical Race Theory 155

radar of the national media, the federal judiciary and the traditional
theaters of power’ (p. 37).
In Chapter 1, Guinier and Torres introduce two of the key ideas woven
throughout the text: political race and magical realism. The concept of
political race is encapsulated in the metaphor that provides the title of
the book—Guinier and Torres state simply and directly that ‘[r]ace, for us,
is like the miner’s canary’ (p. 11). More specifically, Guinier and
Torres argue that like the proverbial canary in the coalmine, which signals
through its death that the air is too toxic for miners to breathe,
the experiences of racially marginalised groups are an important indicators
of how fair and democratic American society is. Non-white communities
are among the first to suffer the consequences of injustice and
undemocratic social practices that will ultimately affect all citizens if
they are not altered. The idea of political race is Guinier and Torres’ effort
to provide a conceptual link between the fates of the canaries and the
miners, both of whom have a fundamental stake in the quality of the air in
the mine.
In the contemporary United States, race is both a matter of social
identity and institutionalised social structures. While for analytical
purposes we might separate these two dynamics, in practice—in our
daily lives—the social-psychological and institutional dimensions of race
are tightly linked. How people are treated in institutional settings is the
product of deeply rooted racialised (and gendered and classed) social
practices that shape how they view themselves and the world around them
and how they act in the world. Guinier and Torres’ conceptualisation of
political race is meant to highlight these complexities of race as a social
category. Yet Guinier and Torres also seek to move beyond analysis to
articulate a rationale for a political project, a democratic social movement
structured around the concept of political race. In Chapters 2 and 3,
Guinier and Torres provide an expanded discussion of their conceptualisa-
tion of and rationale for political race and examples of political race in
practice.
The idea of political race is an effort to reframe race as a concept that
denotes both social location and political commitment. In proposing the
concept of political race, Guinier and Torres are trying to strike a delicate
balance. Their aim is to develop an analysis of inequalities that highlights
how the distribution of power and resources in the United States is
racialised yet also reaches beyond race. This analysis is a key first step
towards the broader goal of their project—the development of grassroots
political initiatives that are built around inclusive agendas that begin with
the issues and concerns of communities of colour, but that are also
expanded to address class, gender and other inequalities. Two points bear
further elaboration. First, Guinier and Torres want to account for both
institutionalised racial hierarchies and racial solidarity. That is, a key
component of their analysis of how race shapes people’s lives includes an
effort to understand the dynamics of historical and contemporary racial
oppression (Young, 1990). At the same time, Guinier and Torres also
recognise that communities of colour are important resources for their

r 2007 The Author

Journal compilation r 2007 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
156 J. M. Powers

members, not the least of which is that they provide what bell hooks
described as homeplace or a ‘safe place where black people could affirm
one another and by doing so heal many of the wounds inflicted by racist
domination’ (hooks, 1990, p. 42).
Second, in their argument for the utility of political race, Guinier and
Torres note a key point of convergence between conservative and some
progressive perspectives on race, their shared emphasis on colour
blindness. Here, Guinier and Torres’ explicitly anchor their analysis of
colour-blindness in the CRT critique of liberalism (Delgado and Stefancic,
2001), although some additional background is useful to better situate
their discussion. Contemporary colour-blindness emerged out of the post
World War II efforts at addressing racial inequality when two trends
converged: (i) social scientists critical of the hereditarian view of race
were starting to shape public debates about race; (ii) the widespread
revulsion over the horrors of Nazism delegitimised the most virulent
forms of scientific racism (Fredrickson, 1971; Pascoe, 1996; Horton,
2005). Liberal reformers advocated removing state-authorised racial
barriers in access to political, economic and cultural resources (e.g.
Myrdal, 1944). Brown v. Board of Education (1954) is widely considered
the paradigmatic example of this stream of social policy, which Horton
(2005) describes as post-war liberalism. However, as many critical race
theorists have pointed out, policies focused on removing racial barriers
(e.g. declaring segregation unconstitutional) are only partial solutions for
addressing racial inequality because they do not alter deeply entrenched
patterns of social stratification that were the product of explicitly racist
public policies.4
In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, as government policies based
on a more robust redistributive principle such as affirmative action were
articulated and implemented, a conservative challenge emerged. Since the
mid-1970s, conservatives have been increasingly successful at promoting
colour-blindness, which is best understood as a radical version of post war
liberalism: because formal or de jure discrimination has been abolished,
all uses of racial categories in public policy—including redistributive
policies meant to address the effects of past racism—are viewed as
illegitimate. As Guinier and Torres also point out, this worldview is
grounded in the assumptions of abstract individualism that emphasises
individual freedom and choice in a world of abstract rights.5 According to
Guinier and Torres, any consideration of the ways that race has functioned
as a social hierarchy where non-whites have been denied access to
political, economic, and cultural resources is outside the scope of the
colour-blind paradigm. Unanchored to a structural critique of racial
inequality, colour-blindness reduces race to skin tone (see also Haney-
Lopez, 2004).
Drawing from the work of Gotanda (1991) and other Critical Race
Theorists, Guinier and Torres argue that if race is viewed only as
phenotype and not as a ‘marker for social status, history, or power’ it is
possible to see any racial classification—including racial preferences—as
negative and stigmatising (p. 38). As Gotanda (1991) notes in his analysis

r 2007 The Author

Journal compilation r 2007 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
 The Relevance of Critical Race Theory 157

of how colour-blindness operates in judicial decision-making, decisions

based on colour blindness,

. . . are often regarded as superior to race-conscious decisions. Proponents

of [colour-blindness] argue that it facilitates meritocratic decision-making
by preventing the corrupting consideration of race. They regard race as a
‘political’ or ‘special interest’ consideration, detrimental to fair decision-
making (p. 17).

A good example of the colour-blind paradigm is Justice Powell’s

argument in Regents v. Bakke (1978) that UC Davis’ admissions
programme should be evaluated using the strict scrutiny standard whereby
the state has to prove that the use of a racial classification serves a
compelling state interest. While he acknowledged past and present racial
discrimination, Powell also noted that some white ethnic groups
experienced ethnic discrimination. Yet racial discrimination and ethnic
discrimination can only be equated by ignoring the history of race
relations in the United States and, more specifically, how relationships of
power and privilege have crystallised around whiteness. Thus Powell can
conclude that ‘the difficulties entailed in varying the level of judicial
review according to a perceived ‘preferred’ status of a particular racial or
ethnic minority are intractable’ (438 US 265, 296).6
Guinier and Torres outline two additional characteristics of the colour-
blind paradigm. First, advocates of colour-blindness argue that recognis-
ing race will perpetuate racial antagonism and racism. Second, the refusal
to acknowledge the structural dimensions of race means that racism is
understood as bad acts by bad people rather than deeply embedded in the
economic, political and cultural systems of a society. Guinier and Torres
note that as a majority of the Supreme Court has come to embrace the
colour-blind paradigm, some progressive liberals have also advocated
colour-blindness as a strategy to preserve social programmes that target
the disadvantaged. These progressives argue that racially-targeted
programs will alienate whites and thus will be politically untenable over
the long term. Many of the latter also view efforts to engage issues of race
as divisive and ultimately, a barrier to the process of coalition building
that is needed to support these programmes.
Yet as Guinier and Torres point out, race continues to be a salient factor
in American society; to illustrate this point they synthesise the findings
from studies analysing the relationship between race and wealth. Black
families and white families with similar incomes diverge sharply when
compared by net worth. Moreover, for most families home-ownership
provides the majority of their assets, and here again black families are
more likely to be disadvantaged. Fewer black families own their own
homes and black families are more likely to own homes in predominantly
minority neighbourhoods where housing values appreciate more slowly
than predominantly white neighbourhoods. Guinier and Torres argue that
these differences in wealth have had, and continue to have intergenera-
tional consequences, particularly when we consider how deeply entwined

r 2007 The Author

Journal compilation r 2007 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
158 J. M. Powers

wealth and access to educational opportunities are in the United States:

‘Race in this society tracks wealth, wealth tracks education, and education
tracks access to power’ (p. 48).7 Thus the colour-blind paradigm cannot
account for the power of institutionalised racial inequalities in housing,
access to health care, educational opportunity and so on, all of which are
deeply interconnected and have persisted long after legalised forms of
discrimination have been abolished.
In Guinier and Torres’ view, the denial or avoidance of the continued
salience of race promoted by advocates of the colour-blind paradigm will
ultimately limit grassroots political organising because it asks people of
colour to bracket their own experiences of racism and racial solidarity and
instead embrace a universalist ideal that is far from being realised in
contemporary practice. Indeed, as Guinier and Torres and many other
critics have pointed out, colour-blindness is a fiction that is maintained by
first noticing race and then denying that it exists, what Gotanda (1991)
calls ‘nonrecognition’ and Pollock (2004) describes as ‘colourmuteness.’
Moreover, colour-blindness reproduces racial privilege because it ‘fosters
the systematic denial of racial subordination and the psychological
repression of an individual’s recognition of that subordination, thereby
allowing that subordination to continue’ (Gotanda, 1991, p. 16; see also
the analysis in Lewis, Chesler, and Forman, 2000). Instead, political race
is meant to capitalise on what Guinier and Torres see as the possible
products of racial consciousness among racial minorities shaped in
part by the shared experiences of racial oppression: the greater tendency
among people of colour to organise politically for social change, and the
psychic resources that racial minorities develop out of positive racial
identities.
In lieu of colour-blindness, Guinier and Torres argue ‘one can identify
race affirmatively in order to mobilise both a critique of the connection
between race and power and to identify a base of support for changing the
status quo’ (p. 57). Political race, then, is best understood as both an
analytic lens and a process. For Guinier and Torres, the most pressing
inequalities in contemporary United States society are linked to race.
Political race is meant to highlight how efforts for social change must
address the needs of communities of colour yet cannot end there—they
must also explore how racial inequalities are linked to other forms of
oppression. Analysing and organising around racial inequality then,
is an entry point into the second step of political race, in which
participants articulate and mobilise around a broader social justice agenda.
This second step also entails coalition building with other allies. The third
step of political race is to ‘experiment with new democratic practices’ that
emphasise inclusiveness, deliberation and problem-solving (p. 96). Here,
Guinier and Torres recognise the hard—and ongoing—work that has to be
done when groups with different experiences and perspectives come
together to organise for social justice. Moreover, they argue that to
effectively organise for social change, activists must directly acknowledge
and address how race and other social inequalities (class, gender,
sexuality) shape not only the injustices they seek to address but also

r 2007 The Author

Journal compilation r 2007 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
 The Relevance of Critical Race Theory 159

intragroup dynamics within activist movements, a point I will address in

more detail below.
Thus, as Guinier and Torres conceptualise it, political race is not a
matter of what you look like but what you do; it is this point that is both
the most challenging and hopeful aspect of their vision. For example, in
their view, whites—and in particular poor and working class whites—can
be ‘raced’ black, in two ways. First, they can experience political and
economic marginalisation. Second, and most importantly, whites can
actively choose to join with people of colour to promote a social justice
agenda aimed at addressing racial inequalities and other forms of injustice.
This vision of cross-racial coalition building leads Guinier and Torres to
rethink conventional understandings of power, which is the focus of
Chapters 4 and 5. Guinier and Torres argue that most liberal strategies for
social change are based on a conventional, ‘zero-sum’ or hierarchical
understanding of power, which they describe as ‘power-over’. Those with
power in a particular social setting have control over their own or others’
circumstances. Moreover, power is understood as a finite resource where
one person’s gain of power is another’s loss. ‘Power-over’ encompasses
not only direct control but more subtle forms of power, including control
over the rules within a social setting and the capacity to shape what
symbolic interactionists have described as the definition of the situation, or
the meaning an event has for oneself and for others.
In contrast, Guinier and Torres argue that cross-racial coalitions
organised around issues of social justice have to be built on a different
understanding of power, which they describe as ‘power-with’.8 Drawing
from the work of Michel Foucault as well as feminist theorists, ‘power-
with’ highlights the role of human agency within the context of collective
action. People working together for social change generate social and
psychological power that is greater than the sum of their own individual
efforts—through their collective activity and also by constructing
counternarratives that are critical of power and privilege. As Guinier
and Torres describe it: ‘This power is generative, it involves sharing or
becoming something, not just demanding and consuming. It expands in its
exercise. It finds a way to call on people to connect with something larger
than themselves’ (p. 141).
One of the strongest examples Guinier and Torres provide to illustrate
the relationship between political race and power-with is the story of the
unionisation of K-Mart9 workers in Greensboro, North Carolina that took
place in the 1990s. Over 65 percent of the workforce at K-Mart’s
Greensboro distribution plant was black; workers at the Greensboro plant
were making $5.10 less per hour than workers at other similar distribution
centres. However, for Guinier and Torres, the crux of this story is how the
union joined with the Pulpit Forum, an association of pastors (also
predominantly black) who led congregations in Greensboro and
surrounding cities to ‘[bring] the larger community into sympathy with
the issues that animated the workforce at the plant’ (p. 131). One of the
issues the leaders had to struggle with was how to frame the issue for the
public. The two conventional narratives for the union’s struggle focused

r 2007 The Author

Journal compilation r 2007 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
160 J. M. Powers

on race or class. That is, the dispute between K-Mart and its workers
was either a case of racial discrimination or a labour dispute. However, to
privilege race over class—or vice versa—risked alienating potential
allies. By asking if it was just for K-Mart to pay its workers in Greensboro
less than it paid workers at other distribution plants because the majority
of the Greensboro workers were black, the Pulpit Forum helped the union
to redefine the struggle in a way that linked issues of race, class
and the well-being of the wider community. When the Pulpit Forum
expanded their activities to include weekly civil disobedience in the
form of praying at the distribution plant, they were eventually joined by
white workers and other members of the community. The demonstrators
were eventually arrested for trespassing; K-Mart subsequently filed a
civil action against the protestors but only the black workers and
ministers were named in the lawsuit. Ultimately, the white workers held a
press conference asking why they were not named in the suit, thus
publicly asserting their common cause with the black workers and
disrupting the conventional narrative of the dispute as an instance of racial
discrimination.
It is also worth noting another example of political race cited by Guinier
and Torres, the effort to create the Texas Ten Percent plan after the Fifth
Circuit court declared race-conscious admissions policies in higher
educational institutions unconstitutional in the 1996 Hopwood decision.10
In this case, members of the Mexican-American caucus in the Texas
legislature, activist organisations such as the NAACP and the Mexican
American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF), and university professors11
worked together to craft a race-neutral admissions policy that was passed
by the Texas State Legislature in 1997. Under the Texas Ten Percent Plan,
the top ten percent of all high school students in the state would be
admitted to any university in the state, including the state’s flagship
universities (UT Austin and Texas A&M) regardless of their SAT scores.
Key support for the legislation—which was passed by a single vote—
came from rural legislators once they realised that the admissions system
then in place also disadvantaged whites from poor rural areas who were
also underrepresented at the flagship universities and that the proposed
plan would increase access for students from these areas as well. While the
policy that resulted was racially neutral on its face—and indeed had to be
because of Hopwood—Guinier and Torres view the process of creating the
Texas Ten Percent plan as an instance of political race and not progressive
colour-blind politics because ‘racial consciousness among people of color
was a crucial element in crafting a cross-racial coalition to make Texas’
educational system more just for Texans throughout the state’ (p. 74).
Many proponents of percentage-based admissions policies, including
Guinier and Torres, view the Texas Ten Percent Plan and other similar
plans that have been implemented in other states, such as California and
Florida, as pragmatic strategies to ensure that the most prestigious public
universities can maintain minority enrolment in the wake of successful
challenges to race-based affirmative action policies. However, some
analysts have raised important questions about whether or not percentage

r 2007 The Author

Journal compilation r 2007 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
 The Relevance of Critical Race Theory 161

plans can effectively support racial diversity in higher educational

admissions (Horn and Flores, 2003). For example, minority enrolment
at Texas A&M and UT Austin declined precipitously in the wake of the
Hopwood decision, and they have only recently rebounded at the latter
(MALDEF et al., 2005). Guinier (2003) attributes the differences between
the two schools in the post-Hopwood era to more the more aggressive
recruitment and retention strategies that were implemented at UT Austin
alongside the Texas Ten Percent Plan. Yet it is also important to bear in
mind that using pre-Hopwood enrolment figures as a baseline for assessing
the effects of the Ten Percent Plan can be somewhat misleading since
minority students tended to be under-enrolled in the two flagship schools
compared to their representation in the pool of high school graduates in
Texas prior to Hopwood (MALDEF et al., 2005).12 After the Supreme
Court’s decision in Grutter (2003), which affirmed that higher educational
institutions can consider race in admissions decisions, UT Austin elected
to incorporate race into their process of evaluating applicant for
admission. Applicants who are not automatically admitted under the
Texas Ten Percent Plan are evaluated against a broad array of academic
and personal characteristics; one of seven factors considered under special
circumstances includes race/ethnicity.
While Guinier and Torres provide numerous accounts of successful
instances of coalitions built around political race, they are also not naı̈ve
about how difficult the work they propose will be. In the final chapter,
entitled ‘Whiteness of a Different Color,’ Guinier and Torres analyse
examples of cross-racial coalition building as a cautionary note. Here, the
key issue for Guinier and Torres is the extent to which groups that have
been racialised differently (i.e. blacks and Latinos) can successfully
organise across racial lines given their different group histories. For
example, they highlight how in the Southwest, Mexican Americans’
ambiguous status as not black yet also not white meant that in some cases,
Mexican American political leaders tried to position Mexicans as white
and thus gain access to white privilege rather than seeing blacks as
possible allies based on their shared experiences of being racialised as
non-white.13 As Guinier and Torres point out, this complex interaction
between local histories and circumstances and the larger narrative of race
in the United States continues to inhibit present-day coalition building
between groups. We might be even more sanguine about the possibility of
creating and sustaining coalitions between people of colour and whites.
It is here that magical realism fits in. According to Guinier and Torres,
political race is at its core a ‘motivational project’ that requires a re-
envisioning of conventional narratives of race. They use magical realism
to highlight how the democratic project at the heart of political race
requires rigorous political and economic analysis, grassroots organising
and the creativity to imagine how we can enact race in new ways. Magical
realism is a literary technique that blurs the boundary between fantasy and
reality for the reader. While the setting and characters of a story are
anchored in realistic settings tied to places and times that are recognisable
to readers, magical realist authors weave supernatural or mystical events

r 2007 The Author

Journal compilation r 2007 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
162 J. M. Powers

throughout the narrative to challenge their readers’ perceptions. Guinier

and Torres explain: ‘The movement from the plausible to the fantastic
disrupts and surprises the reader against all expectations. The constant
imbalance then makes possible a willingness to question, reframe, and
experiment’ (p. 23). The concept of magical realism highlights how the
democratic initiatives the authors advocate require important cultural
work where conventional categories and understandings of racial mean-
ings and racialised social practices must be challenged and reconfigured.
Yet this was also the most underdeveloped component of their analysis.
On the one hand, I appreciated Guinier and Torres’ appropriation of
magical realism as a way to acknowledge the importance of imagination,
creativity, and faith in building and sustaining democratic social
movements. On the other hand, as the authors’ many examples of
power-with ‘in action’ suggest, this cultural work entails a lot of real, on-
the-ground effort on the part of participants that might be better described
with a concept that does not invoke the mystical or the supernatural.
Another point the authors need to develop more deeply is that how
political race is enacted can vary considerably, a point that is illustrated by
the two examples of political race cited above. The white workers in
Greensboro came to realise they and the black workers had shared
material interests and eventually took political action drawing on an
inclusive vision of community wellbeing. In contrast to this more
grassroots-oriented form of political race, from the account Guinier and
Torres provide, the Texas Ten Percent Plan was the result of political
activity on the part of elites, in this case social movement organisations,
university researchers and state legislators.14 Will these different
instantiations of political race play out differently over time? Similarly,
Guinier and Torres describe the poor white high school students attending
rural high schools who benefited from the Texas Ten Percent Plan as the
‘functionally black allies’ of minority students because of their shared
material interests (p. 283). Yet it is an open question whether or not these
students—who were the beneficiaries of a political race project—would
see themselves as ‘raced’ black or choose to engage in a political race
project.
A third issue not fully explored by Guinier and Torres in this volume
has to do with sustaining coalitions built around the concept of political
race. Will race remain at the centre of a coalition’s concerns as the issue it
seeks to address evolves and as its constituency changes? That is,
successful organising and political action around a political race agenda
will alter the political terrain, which will in turn have an influence on the
coalition and its agenda. More specifically, how will race fit into the
broader goals of the coalition as this dynamic process unfolds? As
Reverend Johnson of the Pulpit Forum described the initial problem: ‘You
have to walk through race, you have to work through race’ (p. 133).
However, if over time a coalition moves past race, there is a danger that
the logic of colour-blindness will be reproduced. To return to the example
of the Texas Ten Percent Plan described above, Guinier and Torres use the
concept of political race to analyze the process of creating the admissions

r 2007 The Author

Journal compilation r 2007 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
 The Relevance of Critical Race Theory 163

program. However, now that the plan has been institutionalised, the term
may not be as relevant for the plan in its current manifestations,
particularly since in the wake of Grutter, the two flagship schools have
taken different courses of action (i.e., admissions policies at UT Austin are
race-conscious while admissions policies at Texas A&M remain race-
neutral).
Yet at the same time, the need for the kind of political project Guinier
and Torres’ propose is even more crucial in the wake of events such as
Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans and the November 2005
riots among black and North African youths in France, which made race
and class divisions pointedly visible as few other recent events have
(Murray, 2006). At the same time, there were hopeful signs in the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that illustrate the power that a political
movement based on the principles of political race can have (see the
account in Davis and Fontenot, 2005). Newspapers across the country ran
story after story about how individual citizens who felt moved to make a
difference in strangers’ lives came to the aid of hurricane victims, in many
cases crossing boundaries of race and class. It is this energy that Guinier
and Torres wish to tap. The crucial pieces of the puzzle then, are to figure
out: (i) how these grassroots efforts can be mobilised in the absence of a
large-scale disaster; and (ii) how these largely individual efforts can be
channelled into a larger social movement. By providing a concept that can
be used to analyse and unify what are on the surface a disparate set of
political projects, Guinier and Torres take an important first step in this
challenging undertaking.

Correspondence: Jeanne M. Powers, Division of Educational Leadership

and Policy Studies, Arizona State University. P. O. Box 872411, Tempe,
AZ 85287-2411, USA.
E-mail: [email protected]

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to thank Michele Moses and the editors for their
insightful suggestions that helped improve this essay.

NOTES
1. In a chapter of The Alchemy of Race and Rights entitled ‘Crimes Without Passion’ Patricia
Williams (1991) evokes similar themes. Then a professor at an unnamed institution, where she
was the first black woman to teach in the law school, Williams describes how some of the
questions used in law school exams were framed in racist stereotypes and generalisations that
students were expected to accept—and reproduce uncritically in their answers—and the
resistance she experienced when she tried to raise this issue with her colleagues. See also the
account in Herrera (2002).
2. Wing and Smith’s article is published in the Winter 2006 issue of the UC Davis Law Review,
which highlights a series of papers from the Future of Critical Race Feminism symposium held at
UC Davis in April of 2005.

r 2007 The Author

Journal compilation r 2007 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
164 J. M. Powers

3. See Harris (1993) for an analysis of how white privilege has been institutionalised within United
States law.
4. For an analysis of how white race privilege has been a core feature of American social policy in
the 20th century, see Lipsitz (1998). See also Katznelson (2005) for a detailed historical analysis
of how mid-century public policies such as Social Security and the G.I. Bill were created and
administered in ways that facilitated the creation of the white middle class and thus significantly
widened the racial gap in education, employment and wealth between blacks and whites in the
United States. For analyses of race in the British context, see The Commission on Multiethnic
Britain (2000) and the BBC’s May 2002 report Race U.K. (available online at http://
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1993597.stm).
5. For a discussion of traditional liberalism versus contemporary liberalism, see Moses (2001). For
a historical account of the relationship between race and different strands of liberalism and how
these have played out in the US political context, see Horton (2005).
6. For a historical account of how Celts, Jews, Armenians and Slavs were racialised as white in the
United States, see Jacobsen (1998). Jacobsen perceptively notes that while white ethnic groups
experienced racial discrimination in the early part of the 20th century, which complicates simple
black-white readings of racial discrimination, it is also a mistake to project this discrimination
into the present ‘as though whiteness and the category ‘‘Caucasian’’ had had no purchase at all
upon the nation’s political life’ (Jacobsen, 1998, p. 276).
7. For a detailed analysis of the relationship between families’ wealth, standards of living and
general life chances and the racial gap in wealth in the contemporary United States, see Shapiro
(2004). Shapiro argues that wealth rather than income is a more important indicator of families’
economic standing. If white families and black families at the same level of income are
compared, white families’ net worth and net financial assets, or liquid assets, are far greater than
black families’. Shapiro argues that these contemporary patterns are not simply a function of
families’ differing propensities to save but instead are rooted in the process whereby
‘transformative assets’ or inherited wealth is passed down through generations. Two key forms
of transformative assets are: (1) cash in the form of a gift that allows a family to place a down
payment on a home; and (2) university tuition payments.
8. While only briefly addressed by the authors in a footnote, there are also some important parallels
between Guinier and Torres’ conceptualisation of power-with and Freire’s (1990) discussion of
praxis.
9. K-Mart is a discount department store based in the United States. While the K-Mart Company
operated stores in Asia, Australia, Canada, Europe and Mexico, the company had sold or
discontinued its overseas operations by 2000 largely due to financial problems.
10. In the case of Hopwood v. Texas, plaintiff Cheryl Hopwood and three other white applicants to
the University of Texas Law School challenged the school’s admissions process on the
grounds that black and Mexican American applicants with lower grade point averages and LSAT
scores were admitted over her and her co-plaintiffs in a separate admissions process. The
district court upheld the use of race in the law schools admissions process as a way to address the
effects of past discrimination while declaring the separate review of minority candidates
unconstitutional. The plaintiffs appealed against the decision to Fifth Circuit Court, which ruled
that race-based affirmative action plans were unconstitutional. The Supreme Court denied to
grant certiorari in 1996. (In the US, certiorari is the writ that a court of appeal issues to a lower
court in order to review its judgment for legal error, where no appeal is available as a matter of
right. Since, in most cases, appeal cannot be made to the US Supreme Court, a party who wants
that court to review a decision of a federal or state court files a ‘petition for a writ of certiorari’ in
the Supreme Court. If the court grants the petition, the case is scheduled for briefing and
argument.) Hopwood was overruled by the Supreme Court’s decision in Grutter v. Bollinger
(2003).
11. Gerald Torres was one of the co-authors of the Texas Ten Percent Plan.
12. MALDEF et al. (2005) point out that these patterns are not necessarily an outcome of the greater
selectivity at UT Austin and Texas A&M compared to other state schools. For example,
California’s racial demographics are roughly similar to Texas, and the top UC campuses UCLA
and UC Berkeley are both more selective than their Texas counterparts and also more diverse.
13. While this phrasing is awkward, I use the term ‘racialised as non-whites’ to highlight how whites
are also racialised.

r 2007 The Author

Journal compilation r 2007 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
 The Relevance of Critical Race Theory 165

14. Harris (2003) critiques Guinier and Torres’ analysis of the Texan Ten Percent Plan as an instance
of political race, arguing instead that Bell’s (1980) interest convergence thesis is a better
explanation of why the Texas Ten Percent Plan was passed.

REFERENCES
Apple, M. (2000) Official Knowledge (New York, Routledge).
Bell, D. A. (1976) Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School
Desegregation Litigation, Yale Law Journal, 85.4, pp. 470–517.
Bell, D. A. (1980) Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma, Harvard
Law Review, 93.3, pp. 518–533.
Cho, S. and Westley, R. (2000) Critical Race Coalitions: Key Movements That Performed the
Theory, UC Davis Law Review, 33.4, pp. 1377–1428.
Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (2000) The Future of Multiethnic Britain
(London, Profile Books).
Crenshaw, K., Gotanda, N., Peller, G. and Thomas, K. (1995) Critical Race Theory: The Key
Writings That Formed the Movement (New York, Free Press).
Culp, J. M. (1991) Autobiography and Legal Scholarship and Teaching: Finding the Me in the
Legal Academy, Virginia Law Review, 77.3, pp. 539–560.
Davis, M. and Fontenot, A. (2005) Hurricane Gumbo: Cajun Hospitality and Interracial Solidarity
in the Face of Government Neglect, The Nation, 281.15, pp. 13–18.
Delgado, R. (1984) The Imperial Scholar: Reflections on a Review of Civil Rights Literature,
University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 132.3, pp. 561–578.
Delgado, R. (1992) Imperial Scholar Revisited: How to Marginalize Outsider Writing, Ten Years
Later, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 140.4, pp. 1349–1372.
Delgado, R. and Stefancic, J. (2001) Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York, New York
University Press).
Fredrickson, G. M. (1971) The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American
Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York, Harper Torchbooks).
Freeman, A. D. (1978) Legitimizing Racial Discrimination Through Antidiscrimination
Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Doctrine, Minnesota Law Review, 62.6,
pp. 1049–1120.
Freire, P. (1990) Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York, Continuum).
Gillborn, D. (2005) Education Policy as an Act of White Supremacy: Whiteness, Critical Race
Theory and Education Reform, Journal of Education Policy, 20.4, pp. 485–505.
Gotanda, N. (1991) A Critique of Our Constitution as Colorblind, Stanford Law Review, 44.1,
pp. 1–67.
Gotanda, N. (1996) Failure of the Color-Blind Vision: Race, Ethnicity, and the California Civil
Rights Initiative, Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, 23.4, pp. 1135–1153.
Guinier, L. (2003) Admissions Rituals as Political Acts: Guardians at the Gates of Our Democratic
Ideals, Harvard Law Review, 117.1, pp. 114–224.
Haney-Lopez, I. (2004). Race and Colorblindness after Hernandez and Brown. Paper Presented at
Race and Human Variation: Setting an Agenda for Future Research and Education Conference
(Alexandria, VA, American Anthropological Association).
Harris, C. I. (1992) Law Professors of Color and the Academy: Of Poets and Kings, Chicago-
Kent Law Review, 68.1, pp. 331–353.
Harris, C. I. (1993) Whiteness as Property, Harvard Law Review, 106.8, pp. 1710–1791.
Harris, C. I. (2003) Mining in Hard Ground, Harvard Law Review, pp. 2487–2539.
Herrera, L. E. (2002) Challenging a Tradition of Exclusion: The History of an Unheard Story at
Harvard Law School, Harvard Latino Law Review, 5, pp. 51–140.
hooks, b. (1990) Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (Boston, South End Press).
Horn, C. L. and Flores, S. M. (2003) Percent Plans in College Admissions: A Comparative
Analysis of Three States’ Experiences (Cambridge, MA, Civil Rights Project).
Horton, C. A. (2005) Race and the Making of American Liberalism (Oxford, Oxford University
Press).

r 2007 The Author

Journal compilation r 2007 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
166 J. M. Powers

Jacobsen, M. F. (1998) Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of
Race (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press).
Johnson, K. R. and Martinez, G. A. (2000) Discrimination by Proxy: The Case of Proposition 227
and the Ban on Bilingual Education, UC Davis Law Review, 33.4, pp. 1227–1276.
Katznelson, I. (2005) When Affirmative Action Was White (New York, W. W. Norton and
Company).
Kennedy, D. (1990) A Cultural Pluralist Case for Affirmative Action in Legal Academia, Duke
Law Journal, 1990.4, pp. 705–758.
Ladson-Billings, G. (1998) Just What Is Critical Race Theory and What’s It Doing in a
Nice Field Like Education?, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 11.1,
pp. 7–24.
Ladson-Billings, G. (2005) The Evolving Role of Critical Race Theory in Educational
Scholarship, Race, Ethnicity and Education, 8.1, pp. 115–119.
Ladson-Billings, G. and Tate, W. F. (1995) Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education, Teachers
College Record, 97.1, pp. 47–68.
Lewis, A. E., Chesler, M. and Forman, T. A. (2000) The Impact of ‘Colorblind’ Strategies on
Students of Color: Intergroup Relations at a Predominantly White University, The Journal of
Negro Education, 69.1/2, pp. 74–91.
Lipsitz, G. (1998) The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity
Politics (Philadelphia, Temple University Press).
MALDEF, Americans for a Fair Chance, Equal Justice Society and Society of American Law
Teachers (2005) Blend It, Don’t End It: Affirmative Action and the Texas Ten Percent Plan
After Grutter and Gratz, Harvard Latino Law Review, 8.1, pp. 33–92.
Martinez, G. A. (1994) Legal Indeterminacy, Judicial Discretion and the Mexican-American
Litigation Experience: 1930–1950, UC Davis Law Review, 27.3, pp. 555–618.
Matsuda, M. J. (1996) Where Is Your Body? (Boston, Beacon Press).
Moran, R. F. (2000) Diversity and its Discontents: The End of Affirmative Action at Boalt Hall,
California Law Review, 88.4, pp. 2249–2352.
Moses, M. S. (2001) Affirmative Action and the Creation of More Favorable Contexts of Choice,
American Educational Research Journal, 38.1, pp. 3–36.
Murray, G. (2006) France: The Riots and the Republic, Race and Class, 47.4, pp. 26–45.
Myrdal, G. (2002[1944]) An American Dilemma (New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction Publishers).
Pascoe, P. (1996) Miscegenation Law, Court Cases and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in Twentieth-Century
America, The Journal of American History, 83.1, pp. 44–69.
Peller, G. (2002) A Subversive Strand of the Warren Court, Washington and Lee Law Review,
59.4, pp. 1141–1165.
Perea, J. F. (1992) Demography and Distrust: An Essay on American Languages, Cultural
Pluralism, and Official English, Minnesota Law Review, 77.2, pp. 269–374.
Perea, J. F. (2004) Buscando América: Why Integration and Equal Protection Fail to Protect
Latinos, Harvard Law Review, 117, pp. 1420–1469.
Pollock, M. (2004) Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in a Public School (Princeton, N.J., Princeton
University Press).
Regents v. Bakke 438 US 265 (1978).
Roithmayr, D. (2000) Barriers to Entry: A Market Lock-In Model of Discrimination, Virginia
Law Review, 86.4, pp. 727–800.
Shapiro, T. S. (2004) The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates
Inequality (Oxford, Oxford University Press).
Tate, W. F. (1997) Critical Race Theory and Education: History, Theory, and Implications,
Review of Research in Education, 22, pp. 195–247.
Williams, P. J. (1991) The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University
Press).
Wing, A. K. and Smith, M. N. (2006) Critical Race Feminism Lifts the Veil?: Muslim Women,
France, and the Headscarf Ban, UC Davis Law Review, 39.3, pp. 743–786.
Wing, A. K. (2000) Global Critical Race Feminism: An International Reader (New York, New
York University Press).
Young, I. M. (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University
Press).

r 2007 The Author

Journal compilation r 2007 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain