Notes on CRT and Antiracist Socialism: Ideas for Organizing
I wrote about the terrain of CRT for antiracist socialists awhile ago. But what should we think about CRT itself? The Black Agenda Report published an extremely helpful series on the black materialist politics of Derrick Bell, Jr. This post is an education specific follow-up to that piece, which I highly recommend.
For me, the CRT thing is an occasion to think about what Charisse Burden-Stelly calls antiracist socialism. What can CRT teach us about antiracist socialism, particularly when it comes to organizing?
Here I’m looking at two founding CRT texts–the first two in the landmark 1995 collection tracing the roots of the movement–that are about education, come out of movement work, and feature trenchant critiques of US capitalism. There are ideas for organizing in these texts that might be of use for antiracist socialists today. They’re both by Bell, which fits nicely with BAR’s thesis that his work fits well into the Black radical tradition.
Critical Means Being Critical of Tactics
Bell’s first piece, “Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation,” takes aim at a tension in civil rights law cases, specifically desegregation cases. Bell’s major claim is that lawyers in these cases serve ‘two masters’: the movement organization that pays them to do their legal work and the clients whom they represent in court. Bell, who was an attorney for school desegregation cases, says this is a big problem because some parents represented in these class action lawsuits might have ideas about what counts for them as equal education. These ideas might go against what the NAACP wants in their larger desegregation campaigns.
Brown v. Board of Education, the famous Supreme Court Case, rejected the doctrine of separate but equal. It called for a legal right to equal educational opportunity no matter a student’s race and said segregation violates that right. Legally guaranteeing equal education got operationalized as bussing students from homogenous schools to create a racial balance within the schools. The NAACP and many civil rights organizers were happy with this outcome, or at least thought it was the best they could do.
But Bell makes an important point: what if this racial balancing–bodies in buildings–isn’t the only way to operationalize equal education in line with Brown v. Board? What if Black parents want their own schools with equal resources to predominantly white schools? Why does integration and equal education have to mean a certain distribution of bodies in buildings? What if it meant a school district integrated its finances such that all schools got what they needed and wanted no matter their racial composition? What if it meant regions integrating such that all districts had equal per pupil funding no matter who was living where?
Bell’s point is that NAACP lawyers fighting for integration in the courtroom might not actually represent their clients well if the clients want these things. They will end up listening to the NAACP, who push bussing and racial balancing as the only way to enforce Brown v. Board.
The big idea here is actually a lesson in organizing. The civil rights movement pursued a legal strategy early on, whether it was the American Communist Party’s Legal Defense Fund or the NAACP’s work on lynching. The movement for racial equality decided to focus on changing the law. Further, that more moderate part of the movement chose schools because education is a potent social practice. It represents the future, children, and private property in terms of taxation.
Bell was part of that movement. In these essays, he’s raising his hand and saying hold on a second, something’s not right. We’re pursuing this strategy but it’s leading to an outcome that’s not consistent with our overall project. Maybe we should think about this before agreeing to another bussing ordinance.
This point gets to a crucial question: What does the ‘critical’ really mean in CRT? To Bell, in these two essays, it means providing critiques of your movement from within that movement to make sure it’s on the right track, particularly racial justice movements. Being critical means not going with the flow when you think something is suspect in the strategies and tactics your racial justice movement uses. For him, he was raising his hand and pointing to a flaw in the legal strategy the movement was using for racial equality. He wasn’t making vague, general, personal attacks, or mischaracterizing statements about the tactics. He zeroed in on what exactly was wrong and explained why.
This point has obvious resonance with antiracist socialism. Socialists pursuing all kinds of strategies to fight relations of exploitation should not be afraid to raise a hand and say hold on a second. I can think of two contexts in which one might do this. The first is in one’s own socialist group. Socialists typically have no problem doing this (I have my own battle stories from when I did this in my local chapter of the DSA, and at the national level–a story for another time). The second is if a socialist is working in coalition on racial justice issues. Of course, in both cases, one has to do this deftly and carefully so as not to create unnecessary ruptures.
But Bell sets a good example of how to critique the movement: focus on the tactics, provide evidence, propose alternative strategies. Antiracist socialists have and will continue to make intra-movement interventions to ensure strategies and tactics are adequate and CRT is a good example.
Material Interest Convergence
Bell’s second essay on Brown v. Board and interest convergence is equally helpful for antiracist socialism but in a more sweeping way. The basic question in that early piece is what theory grounds the Brown decision? How do we explain it? Bell proposes interest convergence theory (I-C).
I-C is both simple and provocative. Rather than the neutral power of the law protecting equality, the Brown decision happened–according to I-C– because there was convergence between “political interest groups with a racial configuration.” There are groups with shared political interests. These groups fall along racial lines. When these groups’ interests converge, then things like the Brown decision become a reality. In other words, when it’s in both white and nonwhite groups’ interest to do a thing then it’ll probably happen when it comes to racial equality.
How did white and nonwhite interests converge with respect to the Brown decision? Bell lists three points of interest convergence in 1954, when both white and nonwhite political interest groups had an interest in racial equality in schools:
- The Cold War, specifically communist countries’ pointing out that American ‘freedom’ is a mirage if you consider segregation. It was in white interest groups’ interest to defeat the communist threat, and they had to take that talking point away. Thus, Brown v. board.
- A sizable population of Black men returning home from World War 2 had experienced a measure of equality in foreign countries. These veterans were a potent enough political force to inspire white interest groups to see racial equality as being in their interest.
- Finally, segregation was seen by some white capitalists as an inhibiting industrialization in the south.
Each of these are debatable of course. But I’m seeing a very material analysis here. Bell says clearly in this essay that law reflects the distributions of political and economic power in a society. It doesn’t stand on its own. He’s giving a very clear account of how to understand the material conditions of court decisions and laws enforcing racial equality: it has to be in the material interest of white groups as well as nonwhites. When it comes to Brown, we see the materialism in his analysis, particularly the points about the communist threat and industrialization follow a very marxist logic, foregrounding the mode of production and its relationship to the state.
Further, the language of ‘interest groups with a racial configuration’ is a subtle formulation. Whereas Bell sometimes, in other writings, opts for the more slogany term ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’, in these writings he’s carefully crafting his categories. These interest groups with racial configurations aren’t necessarily classes. But they very well could be. The term has the flexibility to accommodate race/class dynamics in class struggle. Why? Because, as more recent CRT scholarship by Adrienne Dixson points out, convergence isn’t agreeable or harmonic. It’s conflictual. Interests converge when groups organize to pressure those interests into convergence.
Antiracist Socialist Education Politics
I think Bell’s writings have resources for an antiracist socialist education politics, particularly the I-C.
For example, when I taught these essays recently in an independent study, my student and I had a great riff where we were trying to apply I-C to school funding distribution problems. Specifically, we were gaming out whether interest groups with racial configurations today would have converging interests, particularly around school funding in our region. We thought of two districts: Lower Merion and Philadelphia.
The story here is a familiar one in metro regions all over the country. Philadelphia is majority nonwhite, has a ton of issues related to poverty, infrastructure, etc. Lower Merion is majority white and has very valuable property, leading to some of the best schools in the region. Lower Merion’s per pupil expenditure is twice Philadelphia’s.
My student, who’s a teacher in Philly public schools, participated in an action, organized by the Philadelphia Student Union, where teachers and students marched from a Philadelphia school to a Lower Merion school, demanding equal funding. So she wondered aloud: when would people in the Lower Merion school district have interests that converge with people in the Philadelphia school district?
What’s great about this question is it immediately directs you to the balance of forces. You have to figure out the composition of your interest groups and then think about current tensions, torsions, and tendencies that could lead to interest convergence. Our discussion was very fine-grained and got us right to the conjuncture. How could we organize to force interest convergence between these highly racialized formations? It felt like a clear way to practice antiracist socialism. In general, Bell’s writing–foundational texts of CRT–put us in a frame of mind to be looking at the material conditions of education across racial differences, and thinking about how to properly critique our movements from within as we organize.