This document discusses critical race theory and the intersection of race and class. It makes three key points: 1) Race and class are co-constitutive and intersect at individual, group, and societal levels, shaping identity and inequality over time. The exclusion of non-whites from New Deal programs entrenched structural racial inequality. 2) Opportunity structures in domains like housing, employment, education sort individuals and groups in racialized ways. A shift is needed to examine how institutions collectively racialize opportunities. 3) Corporate power increasingly shapes key areas of life and diminishes public and private spaces, with implications for civil rights that are debated in issues like Citizens United.

1. john powell
Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties,
Moritz College of Law
Director, The Kirwan Institute for the Study of
Race & Ethnicity
The Ohio State University
March 18, 2011, U.C
Irvine

2. Today, . . . with the important exception of
employment discrimination, work, livelihoods, social
provision, and the material bases of citizenship
have vanished from the constitutional landscape.
That is a scandal, for the United States is no different
from other nations: Constitutional democracy is
really impossible here . . . without some limits on
social and economic deprivation.
- William E. Forbath, “Social and Economic Rights in
the American Grain”

3. Critical Race Theory on
the Non-Separation
Between Race and
Class

4.  Race, class, and the other categories of
difference that make a difference are co-
constitutive.
 This co-constitution operates at all scales:
• Individual identity
• Group identity and membership
• Intergroup coalitions
• Across space and over time

5.  The New Deal’s racial exclusion
• Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White
• Systematic exclusion of non-whites from New
Deal programs
• Entrenched structural inequality that remains
with us today in the former of harms to people of
color in housing, credit, and labor markets

6.  The weakness of the American welfare
state
• Alberto Alesina & Ed Glaeser
 U.S. welfare state miserly compared to Western
European peers
• Irwin Garfinkel et al.
 Even if U.S. welfare state isn’t so small, it grossly
misallocates resources and is generally regressive
• Joe Soss et al.
 Politics of welfare provision at the state level remains
deeply racialized

7.  Thought-leaders continue to diagnose
the moment as “post-X,” especially post-
racial.
 We hardly need to be reminded that
we’re not post-racial, even if racialization
works differently in the Age of Obama.
 Hence the persistent relevance of CRT’s
insistence on the intersectional
perspective.

8. From Race and Class to
the Structure of
Opportunity

9.  Race and class continue to be important
modes of individual and group identity-
formation.
 But the signal function of race and class is
their role in sorting individuals and
groups within/among institutions.
 Therefore, we must shift our inquiry to
the racialization of opportunity
structures.

10. Effective
Participation
Childcare Employment
Housing
Education Health
Transportation

11.  Structural racism/racialization
• Inter-institutional arrangements and interactions
produce racialized outcomes
 Implicit bias
• Non-conscious attitudes that give rise to mental
schemas, which embed racism and produce
biased behavior.

12.  It’san open question whether America’s
changing racial demographics alter the
picture I’ve sketched—a picture often
framed as white power vs. black
subordination.
 A tentative answer: Maybe not, because
blacks and Hispanics seem to be
converging vis-à-vis opportunity
structures.
• E.g., segregation patterns

13. The Dynamic Role of
Corporate Power

14.  The debate around Citizens United stages
one way to talk about corporate power,
i.e. the apparently zero-sum relationship
between corporate rights and individual
rights.
 Consider in this light the appropriation of
the 14th Amendment to vindicate
corporate rights rather than civil rights.
 But corporations increasingly rework how
power shapes key domains of life.

15.  Misidentifying
the situation, not
public vs. private
Public Private
 Expansion of Private
corporate
prerogative Spheres
Corporate
 Corporate space
diminishes Non- Corporat
public &private
space pubic e
15