White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race

White by Law is an example of critical race theory (CRT), an interdisciplinary field of study pioneered in the mid-1970s by Black American legal scholars, notably, Derrick Bell Jr., Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Patricia Williams. CRT emerged in response to the erosion of civil rights laws and persisting racial inequalities in the US. CRT is concerned with how social conceptions of race and ethnicity shape, and are shaped by, various social structures, including law, politics, and the media. Since 2020, conservative lawmakers have challenged CRT, introducing legislation banning its use in schools across several states (Gross, Terry. “From slavery to socialism, new legislation restricts what teachers can discuss.” 2022. npr.org.)

CRT makes five overarching claims: 1) Racism is ordinary, rather than aberrational; 2) White people will only support racial justice efforts if there is something positive in it for them (a theory of “interest convergence” developed by Bell); 3) Unlearning commonly held beliefs is possible through counter-storytelling, a necessary remedy given curriculum inequities in the American educational system; 4) White people have benefited from civil rights legislation, a point illustrated by the replacement of de jure segregation, or legally mandated segregation, by de facto segregation, where school segregation prevailed in spite of the law not requiring it; and 5) Race is a social construct, with no biological or natural basis (Delgado, Richard, et al.