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of sex with race and class, it renders this legal safety net the least accessible to those who need it the most. 6. Voice of Color—Many critical race theorists believe that minority writ‑ ers and thinkers are generally in a better position than white writers and thinkers to write and speak about race and racism because they experience racism directly. This positionality is called the voice of color. Indeed, “black, Indian, Asian, and Latino/a writers and thinkers may be able to commu‑ nicate to their white counterparts matters that the whites are unlikely to know” (Delgado and Stefancic 9). One might argue that the logic of this idea seems so strong that the phrase matters that the whites are unlikely to know could be accurately replaced with matters that most whites almost certainly don’t know. White people can and do know about many kinds of oppression—for instance, oppression due to class, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, and so forth—and all forms of oppression are horrific. But to think that racial oppression isn’t unique in a myriad of important ways is to ignore over three hundred years of American history regarding race. It is interesting to note that Delgado and Stefancic believe the voiceof-color thesis “[c]oexist[s] in somewhat uneasy tension with anti-essen‑ tialism” (9). That is, because antiessentialism, which critical race theory embraces, holds that there are no essential, or inborn, genetic character traits associated with what we define as race, it may seem self-contradictory to assert that there is such a thing as a voice of color. For the term voice of color, taken out of context, implies that because some people are born with black or brown skin, they are born with some kind of natural racial insight into the operations of oppression. One might argue, however, that there is no self-contradiction here because Delgado and Stefancic are not positing that the voice of color is an essential—that is, an inborn, or genetic— quality. Rather, it is learned through the experience of racial oppression. In other words, the voice of color—the enhanced ability to speak and write about race and racism due to the experience of racial oppression—is socially, not biologically, acquired. So it is reasonable to argue that the voice-of-color thesis is not an example of essentialism and thus does not contradict critical race theory’s antiessentialist philosophy. Of course, we must remember that even members of the same minority group will not necessarily experience the same kind or amount of oppres‑ sion and that individuals will handle their experiences differently. For this reason, members of a minority group who deny the racial oppression they’ve encountered, or who deny that racial oppression is still a prob‑ lem today, obviously would not be useful examples of the voice-of-color thesis. But those who seek to use the voice of color to inform others of the racial injustice they’ve experienced are being encouraged to tell their
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