Tommy Curry & The Real Critical Race Theory

Why is the political right so riled up about Critical Race Theory? And what does the theory itself actually claim? Has Critical Race Theory simply become an umbrella term for all discourse to do with race and racism? And if so, are the accounts of racism as a systemic issue a watered-down account of Critical Race Theory’s more radical critique and diagnosis of the sources of racism?  Tommy Curry is professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.  His book 2018  The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood  won the American Book Award. Curry pulls no punches in his account of how Critical Race Theory has been gentrified by institutional philosophy, and has purposefully forgotten its more radical roots in the work of people like Derrick Bell, who proclaimed that “racism is permanent” and that “black people will never gain full equality in this country."