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3 Geo. J. L. & Mod. Critical Race Persp. 1 (2011)
Shut Your Mouth When You're Talking to Me: Silencing the Idealist School of Critical Race Theory through a Culturalogical Turn in Jurisprudence

handle is hein.journals/gjmodco3 and id is 11 raw text is: ARTICLES Shut Your Mouth When You're Talking to Me: Silencing the Idealist School of Critical Race Theory through a Culturalogical Turn in Jurisprudence TOMMY J. CURRY* INTRODUCTION No intellectual historian can deny the impact of Critical Race Theory (CRT) on the discourse of race and racism in the later part of the 20th century. Critical Race Theory began in the late 1960s, in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, with a series of writings by Derrick Bell. These writings focused specifically on the arrest of civil rights era gains thought to be won in 1964 and the roll back of the political guarantees of desegregation set forth in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).1 In its inception, CRT offered a withering critique of integrationism and exposed the hope of racial equality for Blacks in America as nothing more than a mere illusion. Largely inspired by the Black Nationalist movements of pre-integrationist Amer- ica and revolutionary Black authors like W.E.B. Dubois and Frantz Fanon, Bell developed two theories which laid the theoretical foundations of the CRT move- ment. The first, racial realism, recognized the onerous racial reality of the United * © 2011, Tommy J. Curry, Ph.D. Tommy J. Curry is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Affiliate Professor of Africana Studies at Texas A&M University, College Station, TX. I would like to thank the following legal scholars that made various comments on this article: Richard Delgado, Derrick Bell, Al Brophy, and Peter Alexander. I would also like to thank Gwenetta D. Curry for her reading of previous drafts, Ken Stikkers for his suggestions, and James Haile and O'donovan Johnson for their many conversations about Critical Race Theory and the emergent theory of culturalogics. The capitalization of the word white in this article is done against my philosophical and intellectual principles. It is my belief that the capitalization of the word white incorrectly conveys to readers that the term is neutral and descriptive--whiteness does not refer to a historical group of people that can be or should be thought of as separate from its dehumanizing colonial relationship with African descended peoples and other peoples of non-European descent. To capitalize white suggests that the object and concept marked by whiteness is absolved of its tyrannical racism against non-whites and can be thought to have equal standing with the specific cultural and liberatory identity captured by the word Black and the concept of Blackness. The de-capitalization of the word white next to the word Black conveys the grammatical problematization of the relationship that exists in our linguistic structure and cultural discourse-a relation- ship marred by a history of racist domination. 1. See RICHARD DELGADO & JEAN STEFANCIC, CRITICAL RACE THEORY: THE CUTTING EDGE, at xv (2d ed. 2000) (1999). Critical Race Theory sprang up in the mid-1970s with the early work of Derrick Bell (an African American) and Alan Freeman (a White), both of whom were deeply distressed over the slow pace of racial reform in the United States. It seemed to them-and they were quickly joined by others-that the civil rights movement of the 1960s had stalled, and indeed that many of its gains were being rolled back. New approaches were needed to understand and come to grips with the more subtle, but just as deeply entrenched, varieties of racism that characterize our times. Old approaches-filing amicus briefs, marching, coining new litigation strategies, writing articles in legal and popular journals exhorting our fellow citizens to exercise moral leadership in the search for racial justice-were yielding smaller and smaller returns. Id. at xvi.

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