Rex Kerr
1 min readAug 9, 2022

--

Bell is neoliberal and didn't even reference critical theory directly--he called his views "racial realism", though it was informed by critical legal studies (which was informed by critical theory). Crenshaw is not entirely neoliberal and identified racial realism as a type of critical theory and strengthened the intellectual links to critical theory. Delgado and Stefancic go further, claiming that CRT will happily challenge Englightenment rationality and the foundations of the literal order but without actually managing to do convincingly do either in any of their works that I've read, at least. When you finally get to Kendi and DiAngelo, though, this does start seeming to be true.

Anyway, I don't think Crenshaw's outlook is "pure neoliberal". She is the Queen of Intersectionality, a concept that cuts at the heart of the classical liberal worldview, and although the neoliberal worldview is fairly diverged from the classical liberal one at this point, intersectionality still savages its principles.

(She isn't, however, a Marxist.)

--

--

Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

Responses (1)