Critical Race Theory and African American Literary Criticism

Core Idea

Critical race theory (CRT) began in American legal scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s, with scholars such as Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw and Richard Delgado, who argued that racism is built into ordinary institutions and that race is a social construction rather than a biological fact. Literary critics have applied these ideas to how texts represent race, how racial meaning shapes form and reading, and how literary canons were built. In the same period, critics such as Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Toni Morrison developed theories of African American literature and of whiteness in American writing, which most theory courses teach in the same unit.

How It's Best Learned

Start with W. E. B. Du Bois's description of "double consciousness" in *The Souls of Black Folk* (1903), then read a short passage of Morrison's *Playing in the Dark* (1992) on the "Africanist presence" in white American fiction. Apply both to a canonical text, such as the ending of *Adventures of Huckleberry Finn*, and ask how race shapes its plot and point of view. Finally, read a chapter of Gates's *The Signifying Monkey* (1988) and test his idea of revision on a pair of texts, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker.

Common Misconceptions

• Race-centered criticism only studies books by writers of color. (Morrison's *Playing in the Dark* reads white authors such as Poe, Cather and Hemingway to show how their fiction depends on Black characters and images.)
• Calling race a social construction means race has no real effects. (CRT holds that race was invented by history and law, and that this invented category has very real consequences for people's lives.)
• Critical race theory and African American literary criticism are the same thing. (They overlap, but CRT came from law and addresses many groups, while African American literary criticism has its own longer history, from Du Bois and Alain Locke through Gates, Barbara Christian and others.)

Explainer

In 1903 W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line." He also described "double consciousness," the sense of "always looking at one's self through the eyes of others." Those two ideas, that race structures a whole society and that it divides the self, run through later criticism.

Critical race theory, as a named movement, came from law. In the 1970s and 1980s, legal scholars such as Derrick Bell argued that civil rights victories had not ended racial inequality, because racism was built into ordinary rules and institutions, not only into individual prejudice. Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the term "intersectionality" in 1989 to describe how race and gender combine in discrimination. Richard Delgado promoted counter-storytelling, the use of narrative by people of color to challenge the stories dominant groups tell about themselves.

Literary critics found these ideas useful because literature is made of stories. A CRT reading asks how a text represents race, whose perspective it centers, and what its plot treats as normal. It also asks how race shaped what was published, praised and taught.

Two works from this period are central in literature classrooms. In *The Signifying Monkey* (1988), Henry Louis Gates Jr. built a theory of African American literature from Black vernacular traditions. He argued that Black writers "signify" on earlier texts, repeating forms and figures with a difference. Ralph Ellison's *Invisible Man* revises Richard Wright's protest novel, and Ishmael Reed's fiction parodies both.

In *Playing in the Dark* (1992), Toni Morrison turned to white writers. She argued that American literature's ideas of freedom, individualism and innocence were formed against an "Africanist presence," the figures of enslaved and Black people that appear at the edges of these books. She reads Poe, Willa Cather and Ernest Hemingway this way. The approach changes how familiar classics look.

Critics have also debated these methods. Barbara Christian's essay "The Race for Theory" (1987) warned that abstract theory could crowd out the creative work of Black women writers. When you use this approach, ask how race works in a text's form and point of view, and test your claims against close reading of the words on the page.