Building Theory, Building Community
| Date | 01 September 1999 |
| Published date | 01 September 1999 |
| Author | Angela P. Harris |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466399900800302 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
BUILDING THEORY,
BUILDING COMMUNITY
ANGELA P. HARRIS
University of California, USA
ABSTRACT
Critical race theory in the United States is at a crossroads. As a jurisprudence it seems
to be a success story: the number of legal scholars affiliating themselves with the
movement seems to be steadily expanding; works of critical race theory are widely
cited; and the literature is slowly but steadily moving out from the legal academy to
reach a wider public. On the other hand, critical race theory as a community seems
in danger of fragmentation, implosion, or simple abandonment. This article argues
that the ill health of critical race theory as a community stems from a lack of critical
attention to the politics of community building itself. This lack of critical attention
created a vacuum filled by a patriarchal conception of race as ‘family’, a conception
that ignores the lessons of queer activism and theory as well as feminism. The article
argues that treating community building and community maintenance with the same
critical energies that critical race theorists give to their intellectual constructions is
important not just to the project of saving critical race theory as a community, but to
the world-wide project of how to situate ‘identity politics’ within a strong commit-
ment to justice and human flourishing.
SINCE Ihave been a law professor, I have called ‘critical race theory’ my
intellectual and political home. By critical race theory I mean the litera-
ture emerging from United States law faculties in the past 10 years that
attempts to describe and critique the role of legal institutions and legal dis-
course in the maintenance of white supremacy. This literature draws both on
the postmodernist, deconstructive methods of the Critical Legal Studies
movement and on the modernist pragmatic and moral commitments of the
American civil rights movement (Harris, 1994).
As a literature, critical race theory is flourishing. Hundreds of people
attended a national conference on critical race theory at Yale Law School in
November 1997 to mark the movement’s 10th anniversary. Scholars associ-
ated with critical race theory are busy publishing, and their work is begin-
ning to move outside the confines of legal scholarship. More and more
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (199909) 8:3 Copyright © 1999
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SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 8(3)
students in my critical race theory seminar come to class already familiar with
the work of Patricia Williams, or Derrick Bell, or Kimberlé Crenshaw,
because they have read it as undergraduates. Judging from recent hysterical
attacks on ideas and individuals associated with critical race theory from the
political right, critical race theory is also having an increasing influence in the
wider public debate.
Yet critical race theory as a community seems ready to fall apart at the
seams. Its principal vehicle – the closed summer workshop – seems mori-
bund: there was no workshop in 1998 for the first time since 1987, and none
has apparently been planned for 1999. Even before 1998, long-time work-
shop participants had increasingly begun to stay away. Meanwhile, critical
race theory is beginning to come under fire from its erstwhile allies, scholars
associated with a new movement called LatCrit (short for Latina/o critical
legal theory). LatCrit scholars have called critical race theory to task for being
too focused on the ‘black–white paradigm’ and for failing to deal with the
relationship between race and sexuality. In private conversations, colleagues
of mine within the critical race theory movement have (only half jokingly)
suggested it is time to ‘kill’ critical race theory: to simply abandon the term
and move on to something else.
In this essay, I want to suggest that an important part of the reason why
the critical race theory community is ailing is the failure of critical race the-
orists to give our political work – specifically, our internal community build-
ing and maintenance – the same critical and sustained attention that we have
accorded our intellectual work. As an intellectual movement, critical race
theory is supportive of identity politics, that form of public political action
that connects one’s political commitments to one’s personal identification
with status-based, traditionally subordinated groups. Most critical race
theorists identify personally with a subordinated racial-ethnic group, and we
write and live out of that identification. Thus, critical race theorists have not
only a professional stake, but also a personal and political stake in identity
politics.
Identity politics concerns the tension between the longing for a stable,
authentic, and politically efficacious collective identity and the rejection of
any particular given identity for its exclusiveness, reductionism, and rigidity.
As many critics have pointed out, the fatal flaw of identity politics is its ten-
dency toward fragmentation, as those within the group either expel others
for their lack of authenticity or purity, or withdraw themselves due to the
group’s failure to acknowledge internal hierarchy and difference. Critical race
theorists have, in their published work, actively defended identity politics
and promoted various strategies, such as coalition building or ‘strategic essen-
tialism’, to counter its flaws. Yet critical race theorists have been quite uncriti-
cal about the kind of community critical race theory is or ought to be. Rather,
we have acted as traditional academics in placing our intellectual work before
our political work. In the absence of sufficient critical attention to the process
of community building, ties of racial solidarity have been the social glue
holding the group together, ties that bind yet also exclude in familiar and
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HARRIS: BUILDING THEORY, BUILDING COMMUNITY
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unfortunate ways. Ironically, then, just as the theory of critical race theory
seems ascendant, the practice of critical race theory seems vulnerable to the
very sort of processes of abandonment and fragmentation that we have coun-
tered in our writings.
In an important unpublished essay, Francisco Valdes argues that the
LatCrit movement, of which he is a founder, self-consciously seeks ‘both the
creation of scholarship through community and the creation of community
through scholarship’ (Valdes, typescript, p. 25).1 In his view, LatCrit’s com-
mitment is to ‘promote and ground intra- and inter-group antisubordination
coalitions by ensuring the representation and investigation of various power
hierarchies and their interplay’ (Valdes, forthcoming, p. 27). Toward this end,
LatCrit organizers attempt continually to ‘rotate the center’ of investigation
and discourse from one site of power/identity to another, while simul-
taneously developing and maintaining a critical mass of repeat players from
event to event. The organizers of LatCrit, then, treat postmodernist, anti-
essentialist theoretical commitments as demanding certain social practices,
not just ‘out in the world’ but within the intellectual community itself.
I applaud these endeavors, and hope that critical race theory organizers will
adopt LatCrit’s stance of conscious connection between theory and practice.
In this essay, I will not reiterate Valdes’ detailed description of critical race
theory’s failings and LatCrit’s aspirations. I want only to articulate three
lessons that we can learn from this story. First, I think that the fact that criti-
cal race theorists have largely failed to pay consistent, conscious attention to
our community building reflects in part a failure to pay attention to the
lessons of feminism. In intellectual circles, community building is an area that
consciously or unconsciously gets treated as ‘women’s work’: it is considered
not to be an area of intellectual or strategic interest; it is approached in an ad
hoc way; it is considered ‘touchy feely’ and less important than the extremely
important business of telling people about our ideas; and it is often left to
women to do, along with related interpersonal caretaking activities. Femin-
ism is part the project of taking women, and the work that they are relegated
to do, seriously. Moreover, one of the slogans of the second wave of the
women’s movement in the United States was ‘the personal is political’. One
of the many meanings of this...
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