Critical Race Theory as Legal Epistemic Justice

Authors

Jasmine Gonzales Rose, Boston University School of LawFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-2024

ISSN

0006-8047

Publisher

Boston University School of Law

Language

en-US

Abstract

“Critical Thinking: Not Critical Race Theory” and “Teach Truth: Not CRT,” proclaimed the front and back of a T-shirt on a fellow traveler passing in the airport. I was startled by the blatant misconceptions. The core pursuits of critical race theory (“CRT”) are to think critically, discover truth, and diversify knowledge about race and racism. Although I was aware of then-President Trump’s executive order barring federal diversity training and bills modeled after it, nothing had prepared me for the realization that my academic subfield had become so widely criticized that it was now the subject of T-shirt slogans. A few years earlier, very few individuals outside of law schools, and possibly education graduate schools, had heard the term “critical race theory.” Suddenly, there were people who had never even read a CRT article, or any legal scholarship, who thought that CRT was an imminent threat to education, society, and the nation. This fear and disdain for CRT are unwarranted and stem from a deliberate, unethical, and politically motivated effort to censor and undermine knowledge.

For the past few years, I have pondered: Why attack an academic subfield of law? Why attack CRT now? It cannot be a coincidence that curricular and book bans on CRT followed the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising and national racial reckoning where CRT conceptualizations and vocabulary started being discussed in everyday life and chanted during protests. Anti-CRT efforts are crafted to resist antiracist social change. And the goals, strategies, and tactics of such efforts are highly epistemic in nature.1 Simply put: these attacks on CRT are attacks on knowledge. CRT is misrepresented and halted, often preemptively, in elementary, secondary, and higher education to prevent knowing, understanding, and dissemination of knowledge about race, racism, and other systems of subordination—knowledge that supports social movements and consequent antiracist legal reform. While scholarship has highlighted the epistemic injustice of these attacks,2 the epistemic justice of CRT, particularly its commitment and potential to advance legal epistemic justice, has not been examined.

This Essay explores CRT bans as instances of epistemic injustice and CRT as a powerful example of a legal epistemic justice endeavor. Part I provides an overview of CRT, outlines the various attacks against it, and examines some of the motivations behind these attacks. Part II explains how these attacks and efforts to silence CRT amount to epistemic injustice, homing in on a particularly pernicious form: “legal hermeneutical injustice.” Part III suggests a definition for “systemic hermeneutical justice” and examines how CRT constitutes a leading endeavor toward legal hermeneutical justice. This Essay seeks to prompt further scholarly inquiry into legal epistemic injustice and stimulate our collective imagination on how epistemic justice can be achieved in the law and beyond.

Recommended Citation

Jasmine Gonzales Rose, Critical Race Theory as Legal Epistemic Justice , in 104 Boston University Law Review 1295 (2024).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/3991