Robin DiAngelo, whose website identifies her as a critical race and social justice educator, is one of the most well-known critical race theorists in the U.S. today. Her book White Fragility is a best-seller and she travels the country, giving seminars on race and social justice at churches and universities. In Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, she and co-author Özlem Sensoy, address not just race, but gender, class, sexuality, physical ability, and other identity markers. This book is extremely important for anyone interested in the influence of contemporary critical theory on the secular social justice movement.
Although Sensoy and DiAngelo call their project “critical social justice,” its core ideas are present within numerous subdisciplines falling under the broad category of critical theory. They describe their project, and the broader critical tradition, in this way:
“A critical approach to social justice refers to specific theoretical perspectives that recognize that society is stratified (i.e. divided and unequal) in significant and far-reaching ways along social group lines that include race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Critical social justice recognizes inequality as deeply embedded in the fabric of society (i.e. as structural), and actively seeks to change this. The definition we apply is rooted in a critical theoretical approach.” (p. xx)
The Social Binary
The most recognizable idea within contemporary critical theory is the division of society into oppressor groups and oppressed groups along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, physical ability, and a host of other identity markers. This idea is expressed throughout the book and forms the fundamental framework by which social reality is analyzed. Sensoy and DiAngelo write:
“For every social group, there is an opposite group… the primary groups that we name here are: race, class, gender, sexuality, ability status/exceptionality, religion, and nationality” (p. 44)
“To oppress is to hold down –to press– and deny a social group full access and potential in a given society. Oppression describes a set of policies, practices, traditions, norm, definitions, and explanations (discourses), which function to systematically exploit one social group to the benefit of another social group. The group that benefits from this exploitation is termed the dominant (or agent) group, and the group that is exploited is termed the minoritized (or target) group…. Sexism, racism, classism, ableism, and heterosexism are specific forms of oppression” (p. 61).
“All major social group categories (such as gender) are organized into binary, either/or identities (e.g. men/women). These identities depend upon their dynamic relationship with one another, wherein each identity is defined by its opposite… Not only are these groups constructed as opposites, but they are also ranked into a hierarchy” (p. 63)
Figure 5.1 captures this outlook perfectly:
Hegemonic power
Oppression does not refer primarily to the cruel, tyrannical abuse of power. Rather, it refers to the dominant group’s ability to impose its values and norms on society, justifying its own dominant by appealing to reasoning that comes to appear “natural,” “objective,” or “common-sense.”
“Oppression is ideological. Ideology, as the dominant ideas of a society, plays a powerful role in the perpetuation of oppression. Ideology is disseminated throughout all the institutions of society and rationalizes social inequality... Oppression is embedded within individual consciousness through socialization and rationalized as normal; once people are socialized into their place in the hierarchy, injustice is assured. Oppressive beliefs and misinformation are internalized by both the dominant and the minoritized groups, guaranteeing that overall each group will play its assigned role in relation to the other” (p. 68)
“Hegemony, Ideology, and Power. Hegemony refers to the control of the ideology of society. The dominant group maintains power by imposing their ideology on everyone.“(p. 73)
“Power in the context of understanding social justice refers to the ideological, technical, and discursive elements by which those in authority impose their ideas and interests on everyone.” (p. 73)
“From a critical social justice perspective, privilege is defined as systemically conferred dominance and the institutional processes by which the beliefs and values of the dominant group are ‘made normal’ and universal.” (p. 80)
Lived experience
Lived experience should be prioritized over so-called objective arguments for several reasons. First, according to critical theorists, objectivity is a myth, foisted on us by the hegemony of the ruling class. In reality, all our knowledge (at least our knowledge about the social world) is subjective and is socially constructed.
“all knowledge is taught from a particular perspective; the power of dominant knowledge depends in large part on its presentation as neutral and universal (Kincheloe, 2008). In order to understand the concept of knowledge as never purely objective, neutral, and outside of human interests, it is important to distinguish between discoverable laws of the natural world (such as the law of gravity), and knowledge, which is socially constructed. By socially constructed, we mean that all knowledge understood by humans is framed by the ideologies, language, beliefs, and customs of human societies. Even the field of science is subjective” (p. 15)
“Practicing thinking critically helps us see the role of ideology in the construction of knowledge about progress. It challenges the belief that knowledge is simply the result of a rational, objective, and value-neutral process, one that is removed from any political agenda. The notion of value-free (or objective) knowledge was central to rationalizing the colonization of other lands and peoples that began in the 15th century” (p. 25)
“One of the key contributions of critical theorists concerns the production of knowledge…. These scholars argue that a key element of social injustice involves the claim that particular knowledge is objective, neutral, and universal. An approach based on critical theory calls into question the idea that objectivity is desirable or even possible. The term used to describe this way of thinking about knowledge is that knowledge is socially constructed. When we refer to knowledge as socially constructed we mean that knowledge is reflective of the values and interests of those who produce it.” (p. 29)
“Language is not a neutral transmitter of a universal objective or fixed reality. Rather, language is the way we construct reality” (p. 70).
“Critical theory challenges the claim that any knowledge is neutral or objective, and outside of humanly constructed meanings and interests.” (p. 187)
Second, our relationship to power determines what we can know. In particular, the privilege of dominant groups (whites, men, heterosexuals) blinds them to social reality while the oppression of minoritized groups gives them greater access to truth.
“Positionality is the concept that our perspectives are based on our place in society. Positionality recognizes that where you stand in relation to others shapes what you can see and understand.” (p. 15)
“Positionality asserts that knowledge is dependent upon a complex web of cultural values, beliefs, experiences, and social positions.” (p. 29)
“who we are (as knowers) is intimately connected to our group socialization (including gender, race, class, and sexuality)… ‘what you know’ is connected to ‘who you are’ and ‘where you stand.'” (p. 29-30)
“Dominant groups have the most narrow or limited view of society because they do not have to understand the experiences of the minoritized group in order to survive.. Minoritized groups often have the widest view of society, in that they must understand both their own and the dominant group’s perspective — develop a double-consciousness- to succeed” (p. 70)
“it [is] difficult for dominant group members to see oppression, or to believe accounts of it happening to others.” (p. 87-88)
Social Justice
The ultimate goal of Critical Social Justice is, of course, the attainment of social justice, which is achieved by dismantling the systems, structures, and ideologies of the dominant group. Sensoy and DiAngelo stress that every person is either for this project or against it. There is no neutrality when it comes to the struggle for social justice:
“we do not intend to inspire guilt or assign blame… But each of us does have a choice about whether we are going to work to interrupt and dismantle these systems [of injustice] or support their existence by ignoring them. There is no neutral ground; to choose not to act against injustice is to choose to allow it.” (p. xxiv)
“Mainstream culture prevents us from understanding a central tenet of social justice education: Society is structured in ways that make us all complicit in systems of inequality; there is no neutral ground. Thus an effective critical social justice course will unsettle mainstream perspectives and institutional discourses” (p. 4)
They helpfully summarize their philosophy near the end of the book. “Critical social justice perspectives” are enumerated as:
- There is no neutral text; all texts represent a particular perspective
- All texts are embedded with ideology; the ideology embedded in most mainstream texts functions to reproduce historical relations of unequal power.
- Texts that appeal to a wide audience usually do so because they reinforce dominant narratives and serve dominant interests” (p .210)
Summary
Like Levinson’s Beyond Critique, Sensoy and DiAngelo’s Is Everyone Really Equal? is an important resource for those interested in contemporary critical theory. While the former work focuses on the historical development of critical theory, the latter shows how contemporary critical theory is applied in practice to antiracist and social justice work.
All content on critical theory is available here.
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