our system of civil rights law and enforcement ensures that racial progress occurs at just the right slow pace. Too slow would make minorities impatient and risk destabilization; too fast could jeopardize important material and psychic benefits for elite groups. When the gap between our ideals and practices becomes too great, the system produces a

Color blindness can be admirable, as when a governmental decision maker refuses to give in to local prejudices. But it can be perverse, for example, when it stands in the way of taking account of difference in order to help people in need. An extreme version of color blindness, seen in certain Supreme Court opinions today, holds that it is wrong

Indeed, one aspect of whiteness, according to some scholars, is its ability to seem perspectiveless or transparent. Whites do not see themselves as having a race but as being, simply, people. They do not believe that they think and reason from a white viewpoint but from a universally valid one—“the truth”—what

Materialists point out that conquering nations universally demonize their subjects to feel better about exploiting them, so that, for example, planters and ranchers in Texas and the Southwest circulated notions of Mexican inferiority at roughly the same period that they found it necessary to take over Mexican lands or, later, to import Mexican

If race is not real or objective but constructed, racism and prejudice should be capable of deconstruction;

The second feature, sometimes called “interest convergence” or material determinism, adds a further dimension. Because racism advances the interests of both white elites (materially) and working-class whites (psychically), large segments of society have little incentive to eradicate it.

what everyone knows.

But a more basic problem is that much hate speech is simply not perceived as such at the time. The history of racial depiction shows that our society has blithely consumed a shocking parade of Sambos, coons, sneaky Japanese, exotic Orientals, and indolent, napping Mexicans—images that society perceived at the time as amusing, cute, or, worse yet,

Crits are suspicious of another liberal mainstay, namely, rights. Particularly some of the older, more radical CRT scholars with roots in racial realism and an economic view of history believe that moral and legal rights are apt to do the right holder much less good than we like to think. In our system, rights are almost always procedural (for