Not-so-critical race theory: a retort to Hodgkinson et al’s ‘critical assessment’ of the Black Lives Matter movement in the UK

In late 2021 Hodgkinson and colleagues presented several critiques of the centrality of race to the political underpinnings of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The article proposed that the marginality of Black individuals was instead bound up with socioeconomic marginalisation. They included seemingly racialised inequities in the Criminal Justice System (CJS). The argument implicitly undermines the lived experiences of racialised minority groups and their concerns about race and criminal justice. It also suggests that racial inequalities are not substantive enough to be a central disciplinary theme in criminology. Hodgkinson et al’s argument conflates Black Lives Matter – a social movement – with Critical Race Theory (CRT) – an academic body of knowledge and theory. The article’s premise was a ‘critical assessment’ of BLM via the medium of critiquing CRT. However, the authors draw on a plethora of works, embodying a wide range of political positions on ‘race’, and assumed that they are works of CRT. This produced recurring straw premises. Because students and other readers unfamiliar with CRT might uncritically absorb the subtext of the article as representative of a consensus in the field of criminology, we felt it appropriate to provide a critical retort.