Gender, Race, and Rights: Listening to Critical Race Theory

In The Alchemy of Race and Rights, Patrida Williams reminds us the constitutional foreground of rights was shaped by whites, parceled out to blacks in pieces, ordained from high in smaU favors, random insulting gratuities. As Williams explains, 7RIgUtS' feels new in the mouths of most black people. It is still deUdously empowering to say.... The concept of rights, both positive and negative, is the marker of our dtizenship, our relation to others.1 In suggesting that the concept of rights can empower the oppressed rather than merely coopt them, Williams asks that we reconsider the relationship between gender, race, and Just like activist African-American club women in the early twentieth century,2 she suggests that legal rights need not obUterate radal identity. The absence of rights gives a green light to radsm. Historians of Reconstruction, like Eric Foner, have documented the African-American quest for Indeed, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments appear as responses to a bottom-up movement on the part of freed women and men whose daA¼y actions demanded citizens' rights. The formerly enslaved, Foner argues, chaUenged the nation to Uve up to the fifll impUcations of its democratic creed and helped set in motion events that fundamentaUy altered the definition of dtizenship for aU Americans.3 In the modern dvA¼ rights movement, we again witness African Americans taking advantage of the gap between the promise of America and its reality. Patrida Williams is part of a loosely defined school within legal scholarship that most historians—including many historians of women who have considered the new feminist jurisprudence—have notbegun to read or Usten to: critical race theory. There are a number of possible reasons for this lacuna. Tlace' has been the undertheorized category of the analytic trinity of gender, 'race', and dass; it is too often taken as natural rather than sodally, culturaUy, and poUticaUy construded. For too many, 'race' stiU appears to exist in the realm of the biological rather than being seen, like gender, as an identity that is created.4 The focus of gender analysis on the dyad male and female also has obscured other interacting categories of sodal Hf e that shape the meaning of female or male in a given circumstance. Until we understand the multiple identities of women and men, and how that multipUdty shapes the meaning of gender itself, we impoverish our analysis by taking for