Review of “The Racialized Social System: Critical Race Theory as Social Theory”

Abstract

Since former President Trump’s 2020 Executive Order banning critical race theory, the scholarship has been at the center of an international moral panic. Right-wing American, British, and French commentators invented a conspiracy theory version of critical race scholarship (Marxism! Black supremacy!). Once constructed, conspiracists blamed critical race theory for several alleged social ills, including making white kids uncomfortable and destroying nationalist sentiment. Although the acute stage of this moral panic may be receding, critical race theory’s reputation as a body of scholarship aimed at diagnosing and curing racial inequality is tarnished. Scholars concerned about racial inequality—for intellectual and ethical reasons—should be worried, as it will likely take time to reverse the damage. Answering objections from academic and lay opponents of critical race theory, Ali Meghji’s The Racialized Social System: Critical Race Theory as Social Theory shows what recovering from this moral panic will look like. Contra academic detractors who claim that critical race theory does not provide a coherent analytical framework, Meghji contextualizes the development of critical race theory in legal studies in relation to the broader set of critical theories of race and racism that were bubbling up in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The theoretical imprimatur of these currents runs deep, as these intellectual movements were part of a long lineage of radical thought from racially marginalized scholars such as Oliver Cromwell Cox, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Joyce Ladner. For lay readers (and I’m sure this book will draw interested non-specialists), Meghji provides an accessible overview showing critical race theory’s explanatory power across the social sciences.