RUFO OR CONSEQUENCES?:

As a school of thought, CRT was pioneered by thinkers such as Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, Cheryl Harris, Richard Delgado, and Matsuda Mari. Derrick Bell's concept of interest-convergence, which is the idea, according to NPR, "that black people achieve civil rights victories only when white and black interests converge," helped usher in the theoretical principles that underpinned the works of other critical race theorists. Those theoretical principles also include the ideas of unconscious racism and retrenchment.

At a time when many dismissed legal scholar Herbert Wechsler's complaints against the neutrality of the Supreme Court in the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education (which led to the end of state-mandated segregation in public schools), Derrick Bell, an anti-racist legal scholar at Harvard, surprisingly took him seriously. Wechsler argued: "If the freedom of association is denied by segregation, integration forces an association upon those for whom it is unpleasant or repugnant." Bell was inclined to agree. To Bell, the Supreme Court directly intervened against the right of people to associate with whom they wish, for political, and not necessarily constitutional, purposes. There was, in Brown, no newfound realization that the Republic had failed to understand its past. Something else was going on. To Bell, Wechsler was suggesting a "deeper truth about the subordination of law to interest-group politics with a racial configuration."

Freedom of association would be sacrificed only when these racialized groups found that, at a certain point in history, the cultural, political, or social context allowed for their interests to converge. This is the concept of interest convergence.

Bell's pathbreaking work on Brown dedicated a mere two sentences to a key concern that the post-Brown era posed:

The Court has increasingly erected barriers to achieving the forms of racial balance relief it earlier had approved. Plaintiffs must now prove that the complained-of segregation was the result of discriminatory actions intentionally and invidiously conducted or authorized by school officials.

This was Bell's concern: that some actions are racist by consequence even if by intention they are not.

Charles R. Lawrence III sought to address the issue. In his 1987 article on the subject, Lawrence summons a character that was quite familiar during the civil rights era: the white moderate who was not explicitly racist, only accidentally so, who, with a slip of the tongue, seeks to compliment by saying, "I don't think of you as a Negro."

In 1976, the Supreme Court reached a decision, Washington v. Davis, that required plaintiffs challenging racial discrimination to prove that their complaint was rooted in a racist intention. What Charles R. Lawrence III wanted to ask was: what if it isn't racist in intention, but is racist by consequence?

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