Chapter 6: Critical Race Theory and the Demography of Death and Dying

Over the last decade, Critical Race Theory (CRT) has become a popularly utilized term that references the study of consideration of race in theory or analyses of American society. Within current parlance, CRT rarely if ever conveys the original analyses or paradigms of Derrick Bell and other racial realist thinkers of the tradition. The canonization of Critical Race Theory emphasized discursive analyses that were compatible with the dominant Eurocentric and integrationist ideologies of the post-civil rights era. The actual Civil Rights Era, which was comprised of student protests, academic rebellion, social unrest, and anti-colonial and anti-imperialist political postures, was far too tumultuous and spontaneous to be sustained within the organization of academic disciplines. Whereas academic disciplines wanted to emphasize the ability of American democracy to accommodate the demands of minority groups towards new more equal social arrangements, the protests traditions of the Civil Rights Movement, and the Black Power movements of the late 1960s and 1970s indicated the ability of democracy in the United States to in fact become an egalitarian political arrangement. In Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement(1995) the editors wrote that: