2115 - Exposing Invisible Burdens: Critical Race Theory and Racialized Emotion

Session Submission Type: Invited Session

Description

Critical race theory (CRT) is a theoretical tradition born in the legal academy in the post-civil rights era; this theoretical frame arose as an intellectual response to the failure of the legal changes resulting from the Civil Rights Movement to meaningfully create structural racial equity in the United States. Central to the CRT tradition is attention to the mechanisms and discourses that function to reproduce white domination throughout the U.S. social system. Emotion is a core mechanism in that reproduction; this Thematic Session explores the multiple ways in which emotions function and get deployed in the protection and reproduction of white power, privilege, and wealth. Racialized emotional manipulations take a variety of forms. On the one hand, for example, whites manipulate emotional tropes to normalize racial hierarchy and white power, deploying white fragility in the form of shock, anger, denial or sadness to shut down discussions about white racism. On the other hand, people of color must navigate emotional responses to white racism creating a heavy and generally unrecognized burden for people of color in white spaces—for example people of color often engage in emotionally stressful battles to challenge the dehumanizing characterizations of people and communities of color with little or no recognition of the emotional costs of such projects. Moreover, normative white narratives frequently frame whites as non-emotional and people of color as overly emotional, making these emotional projects even more challenging to identify and expose. This session will explore these and other ways in which racialized emotion connect to and facilitate white domination in the law and social structure.

Sub Unit

• Presidential Panels

Session Organizer

• Wendy Leo Moore, Texas A&M University

Individual Presentations

• What! I Can't Discriminate? I'm Crushed: A Law-and-economics and Critical Race Theory Analysis of the Comparative Emotional Costs of Hate Speech and Hate-speech Regulation to the Speaker and His Target - Richard Delgado, University of Alabama; Jean Stefancic, University of Alabama

• Normalizing Hate in Immigration Law Enforcement: Making America White Again - Mary Romero, Arizona State University

• Interracial Relationships, Stigma, and Emotion - Russell Robinson, University of California-Berkeley

Discussant

• Wendy Leo Moore, Texas A&M University