Racist ideas have defined our society since its beginning and can feel so natural and obvious as to be banal, but antiracist ideas remain difficult to comprehend, in part because they go against the flow of this country’s history.

In the 1920s, W.E.B. Du Bois started binge-reading Karl Marx. by the time the Great Depression depressed the Black poor worse than the White poor, and he saw in the New Deal the same old deal of government racism for Black workers, Du Bois conceived of an antiracist anticapitalism. Howard University economist Abram Harris, steeped in a post-racial Marxism that ignores the color line as stubbornly as any color-blind racist, pleaded with Du Bois to reconsider his intersecting of anticapitalism and antiracism.

The last four decades have seen a proliferation of research about the complex and largely hidden ways that white racism and white racial dominance pervade U.S. culture and institutions. Sociologists, in particular, have played an instrumental role in revealing how white people’s feelings, attitudes, and behaviors consistently reproduce the laws and structures that privilege them, even when they conscientiously espouse principles of equality. An implicit goal of this research has been to generate greater understanding of how to eradicate racial inequalities, and frequently sociologists have formulated sophisticated and important accounts that support this kind of social justice work.

CRT begins with a number of basic insights. One is that racism is normal, not aberrant, in American society. Because racism is an ingrained feature of our landscape, it looks ordinary and natural to persons in the culture.

The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power. The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up, but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, context, group - and self-interest, and even feelings and the unconscious. Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.

CRT’s framework is comprised of the following five tenets: counter-storytelling; the permanence of racism; Whiteness as property; interest conversion; and the critique of liberalism.

The national picture is grim. Research from a number of different sources shows how racism is weaved into the fabric of our world. This demands a collective redefinition of what it means to be racist, how racism manifests, and what we must do to end it.

We are surrounded by racial inequity, as visible as the law, as hidden as our private thoughts. The question for each of us is: What side of history will we stand on? A racist is someone who is supporting a racist policy by their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea. An antiracist is someone who is supporting an antiracist policy by their actions or expressing an antiracist idea.

there is no such thing as a not-racist idea, only racist ideas and antiracist ideas.

To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism. The conjoined twins are two sides of the same destructive body.

A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups.

RACIST: One who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea.
ANTIRACIST: One who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea

For realists, racism is a means by which society allocates privilege and status. Racial hierarchies determine who gets tangible benefits, including best jobs, the best schools, and invitations to parties in people's homes

But racism is one of the fastest-spreading and most fatal cancers humanity has ever known. It is hard to find a place where its cancer cells are not dividing and multiplying. There is nothing I see in our world today, in our history, giving me hope that one day antiracists will win the fight, that one day the flag of antiracism will fly over a world of equity. What gives me hope is a simple truism. Once we lose hope, we are guaranteed to lose. But if we ignore the odds and fight to create an antiracist world, then we (...)

Racism goes beyond individual intentions to collective group patterns

the current acceptance of the status quo is an example of institutional racism.

I was born into a culture in which I belonged, racially. Indeed, the forces of racism were shaping me even before I took my first breath.

Racism is especially rampant in places and people that produce knowledge.

Epistemological racism in academe is not isolated from individual and institutional racism. All three forms of racism are intertwined, producing, and sustaining the system of domination and marginalization of ideas, systems, and people. What we see and hear in books, journals, or conferences are the results of the decisions to accept or reject certain ideas produced by real people. These decisions made by authors, presenters, reviewers, and editors affect how many male or female scholars or white, black, indigenous, Asian, and Latinx scholars appear in publication titles and conference programs. This ultimately influences the racial and gender diversity of faculty (...)

The sexism, racism, and classism that exist in the West may resemble systems of domination globally, but they are forms of oppression that have been primarily informed by Western philosophy. They can be best understood within a Western context, not via an evolutionary model of human development. Within our society, all forms of oppression are supported by traditional Western thinking. The primary contradiction in Western cultural thought is the belief that the superior should control the inferior. In The Cultural Basis of Racism and Group Oppression, philosopher John Hodge argues that Western religious and philosophical thought are the ideological basis (...)

7. Myth of meritocracy/race is irrelevant for success
This microaggression occurs when people deny the ongoing existence of systemic racism or harmful discriminatory behavior, specifically in regard to personal achievement or barriers to achievement. They embrace the myth of meritocracy and the notion that the determinants of success are unequivocally rooted in personal efforts, refuting that White privilege is an unearned benefit resulting in tangible differences in outcomes at a personal or societal level.

Cultural racism has been identified as the individual and institutional expression of the superiority of one group’s cultural heritage (arts, crafts, language, traditions, religion, physical appearance, etc.) over another group with the power to impose those standards (Jones, 1997). Its ultimate manifestation is ethnocentric monoculturalism (Sue & Sue, 2016), or in the case of the United States, an ideology of White supremacy that justifies policies, practices and structures which result in social arrangements of subordination for groups of color through power and White privilege. Huber and Solorzano (2014) used the term macroaggression to refer to the power of institutional and (...)

Racism is ordinary, not aberrational - “normal science“, the usual way society does business.

The permanence of racism suggests that racism controls the political, social, and economic realms of U.S. society.

Racism is the norm rather than an aberration.

In his groundbreaking book on the logics of colorblind racism, Bonilla-Silva (2003) introduced four frames of colorblind ideology: cultural racism, naturalization, minimization of racism, and abstract liberalism. He drew on two decades of race theory that compellingly demonstrated how “whites rationalize minorities’ contemporary status as the product of market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and blacks’ imputed cultural limitations” (Bonilla-Silva 2010:2). The frames enable white people to continue theoretically, morally, and/or otherwise objecting to racism and racial injustice, while rejecting any real actions, policies, behaviors, and understandings that could work toward dismantling systemic racial inequality. By absolving whites as beneficiaries of (...)

Denial is the heartbeat of racism, beating across ideologies, races, and nations. It is beating within us.

Specifically, individualism obscures racism because it does the following things:
- Denies the significance of race and the advantages of being White
- Hides the collective accumulation of wealth over generations
- Denies the historical context of our current positions
- Prevents a macro analysis of the institutions and structures of social life
- Denies collective socialization and the power of dominant culture (such as media, education, and religion) to shape our perspectives and ideology
- Maintains a false sense of colorblindness
- Reproduces the myth of meritocracy, the idea that success is the result of hard work alone

We know how to be racist. We know how to pretend to be not racist.

The rhetoric of innocence draws its power not only from the cultural significance of its basic terms but also from its connection with “unconscious racism.“ Professor Charles Lawrence explored the concept
of “unconscious racism“ and its implications for equal protection.