Race Theory

Critical race theory

the theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice but that racism is deeply imbedded in society, its institutions and its legal systems in order to uphold white supremacy 

Critical race theory

-emerged in the mid 1970s from a collection of activists and scholars as the civil rights movement was dying down, the civil rights movement didn’t fix everything particular economic inequalities 

-Dr. Derrick Bell, a key scholar in critical race theory 

-Dr. Kimberele Crenshaw 

-looking at the racial inequality in the US (housing, segregation, economic) based on empirical evidence such as life expectancy

-how to better understand race 

W.E.B Du Bois (1868-1963)

- American sociologist, first black person to earn a  doctoral degree from harvard

-famous lines from his book, “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line”

-Double consciousness: always looking at one’s self through the eyes of a racist white society and measuring oneself by the means of nation that looked back in contempt 

-internalized racism 

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)

• Looked at what it was like to be a black person in a white world

• His books were banned for saying that violence was needed to override colonization 

Main tenants of critical race theory

• Racism is ordinary, imbedded in the everyday (accents, how Canadian’s don’t have accents, european accents are seen as attractive but accents from the global south sound funny and are weird) 

• Racism serves psychological and political purposes that supports white dominance (income equality, who benefits form racial policies, psychological, who has the right to belong in north america) 

• Race is a social construction 

• Racism is both structural and ideological 

• Centers the experiences of BIPOC

• Intersectionality, different systems of power intersect with race 

• Whiteness studies: being white is a racial category 

Race as a master category

• Shaped and continues to shape history, politics, economic structures and cultures of north america 

• Shapes the definition of rights and privileges, 

• Shapes the distribution of resources 

• Shapes practices and ideologies of oppression 

• Race amplifies other forms of oppression (ex: Black women are at higher rates of sexual harassment)

3 pillars of White supremacy and connection to capitalism

Slavery: black people are only seen as free labour, reduced black communities to their bodies (present today with police brutality and the cjs) racial justification that they were dangerous and need to be controlled 

Genocide: Indigenous people need to be disappeared contained in prisons today, star light tours 

Empire: imperialism invading the middle east and then closing the border, detaining migrants and thinking those communities don’t belong and their cultures are inferior, no fly list today 

What is race?

1. Race typically has its origins in assignment 

• When European settlers called Indigenous people “Indian” and that was viewed as inferior

• Ethnic identity: when communities reclaim that identity 

• Powerful group gives less powerful group an identity 

2. Race is a product of colonization 

• When european colonizers (Spain, portugal, netherlands, etc) sent people and when they met people that looked different from them they thought the met different races but we’re all one race

3. The emergence of race directly connect to power relations 

-when european colonizers said there were different races there was a hierarchy that they were at the top and communities of colour were at the bottom, they justified taking their land, oppressing them and viewing them as inferior, the colonization they were doing was justified.

4. Racial designation typically implies inferiority 

• Only doesn’t imply inferiority when they’re white, implies superiority 

• Cultural, intellectually, morally inferior, labelling them as less than 

5. The unworthiness attached to race is inherent 

• Less moral worth to their life as you believe that they are inferior 

Difference between race and ethnicity

Ethnicity at work 

-Ethnicization: it is the process by which groups of person some to see itself as a distinct group linked by bonds of shared history, cultural symbols perceived common ancestry etc

Race at work

-racialization: it is the process by which groups come to be classified as races, it is the process by which certain characteristics (often psychosocial) are used to systematically to mark certain persons for differential status or treatment 

• A person can be both 

• Worse outcome of race is genocide 

• Ethnicity, people seek pride in 

Race as being both structural and ideological

-when we think about groups experiences we have to think about structural and ideological processes behind it 

-ex: Chinese head tax

-ideological: chinese people “didn’t” belong in Canada 

-reverse racism doesn’t exist because race is structural, there is no domination or a group that has the power 

Factors that help us understand racism in policing?

1. History of policing 

-before rcmp there was the north west mountain police (later become rcmp) it was tied to stopping the illegal bringing of alcohol into Canada but it was argued that it was actual meant to control Indigenous people, a tool to take Indigenous people off the land in the west to make way for the railway 

- policing was created to control racial minorities 

2. Police are the visible embodiment of the dominant’s group power 

• The police often maintain, prioritize and work to be tools to maintain the dominant groups power, tools of colonizers, who gets to decide which communities are policed, which crimes are considered crime, which communities are not policed and not protected 

• Ex: Policing protests, suppressing protests

3. Police culture 

-tends to be racist, the more time police officers spend in policing they become more racist to communities of colour, also sexist, homophobic, brotherhood, us vs them, because they have legal right to use violent this becomes a way to demonstrate racial violence to communities of colour, use of excessive force when they’re not legally permitted. 

4. Lack of representation? 

-policing is mostly white men profession, in the past it was theorized that if more people of colour become police maybe racial inequality would improve but that did not work as white supremacy is a structure that poc officers may internalize or agree with 

-poc officers get tokenized rather than addressing systemic problems in the police 

Racialization of crime

• crime is racialized when criminal behaviour is viewed as a trait belonging to the wider racial or ethnic community such that all ‘phenotypically similar individuals are rendered pre-criminal and morally suspect’ 

• Ex: Muslim youths are seen as future extremists and need to have programs so that they don’t end up becoming extremist

• Historically the criminal was seen as racialized figure, multiple racialized groups get seen as criminals

Strategies involved in racializing crime

• the decision to police certain kinds of crime over other types  

• The over-emphasizing of crimes committed by racialized minorities and failures to recognize racialized people as victims of crimes (much less likely to get media coverage for their crimes over white people), this causes people to stop seeing them as humans but only through one lens (as criminals)

• The use of specific terms and codes in conversations about racialized groups and crime ex: Alien, terrorists 

• Use of biological/cultural differences in approaches in understanding crime