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African American criticism
The prison population is largely black and brown; chief executive officers [of corporations], surgeons, and university presidents are almost all white. . . . [B]lack families have, on the average, about one-tenth of the assets of their white counterparts. They pay more for many products and services, including cars. People of color lead shorter lives, receive worse medical care, complete fewer years of school, and occupy more menial jobs than do whites. A recent United Nations report showed that African Americans in the United States [if thought of as comprising a nation of their own] would make up the twenty-seventh ranked nation in the world. . . [in terms of] social well-being. Latinos would rank thirty-third. (Delgado and Stefancic 10–11)
I think the first fact listed in the passage just cited deserves further comment because the disproportionate number of prisoners of color in this country has encouraged, if not created, the misconception held by many white Americans that a disproportionate number of African Americans are criminals, in other words, that criminality is an African American trait. In order to show the flaws in this kind of thinking, let me offer just one striking example of why there is a larger proportion of African Americans than whites incarcerated in our country. It takes only five grams of crack cocaine (used predominantly by black Americans) to trigger a five-year mandatory prison sentence. However, it takes five hundred grams of powder cocaine (used predominantly by white Ameri‑ cans) to trigger that same five-year mandatory prison sentence. Discriminatory laws like these draw attention to the use of drugs in poor black neighborhoods, a situation that has resulted in increased police surveillance in these areas, while drug use in white neighborhoods is largely ignored. In fact, in the United States the majority of drug users (of all kinds) are white. Yet the majority of prisoners incarcerated for drug-related offenses are black (Tyson 150–51). As this repre‑ sentative example illustrates, the racial bias of our legal system, not the “natural” criminality of African Americans, has put many black Americans behind bars who wouldn’t be there if they were white. Clearly, many African Americans are still routinely deprived of their civil rights despite the civil rights laws intended to guarantee these rights. Perhaps, then, one useful way to think of critical race theory is as a new approach to civil rights. Initiated by the work of Derrick A. Bell Jr. and others in the 1970s, critical race theory began at a time when the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s ceased to be a political or social force. And though critical race theory started out as a critique of constitutional law—that is, federal law, which is based on the Constitution and which the laws of individual states are not supposed to violate—it has spread to almost every discipline, including the humanities. As we’ll see, critical race theory concerns itself with every topic that is relevant to race. In addition to investigating such obvious issues as the kind of oppression described in the passage quoted above, critical race theory examines the ways in
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