The Imperial Scholar: Reflections on a Review of Civil Rights Literature

Abstract

An early example of Critical Race Theory, this article analyzes citation patterns of leading white scholars of civil rights. After revealing that those dominant figures, all staunch supporters of minority causes, cited mainly each other and not the growing number of black and Latino scholars who were beginning to write about affirmative action, housing discrimination, and other related areas, I go on to show that this pattern of neglect has real consequences, including "blunting and skewing" in the treatments of race and an impoverished discourse on this vital subject.