Critical Race Theory1

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.

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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 international’ 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 knowledge’ (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 wellplaced 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

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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

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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 revisioning 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

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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 conceptualisation 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

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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 HaneyLopez, 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

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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 decisionmaking (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 colourblind paradigm. First, advocates of colour-blindness argue that recognising 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 intergenerational 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

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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

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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, ‘powerwith’ 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

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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

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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 naı¨ve 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 reenvisioning 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

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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 meanings 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, onthe-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

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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 raceneutral). 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

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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

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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.

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