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CHAPTER TWO Historicizing Critical Race Theory's Cutting Edge: Key Movements That Performed the Theory Sum; Cho and Robert Westley IN THIS CHAPTER, we attempt to retrieve an obscured history that we believe was central to the development of Critical Race Theory-the history ofstudent activism for diversity in higher education from the 1960s to the 1990S. To do so, we focus on one longitudinal case study in particular, that of the University of California at Berkeley's Boalt Coalition for a Diversified Faculty (BCDF). This local movement, which became national in 1989 with the BCDFcoordinated Nationwide Law Student Strike for Diversity, embodied and practiced many of the insights theorized by CRT; it was a movement that performed the theory. This retrieval thus may help critical race theorists not only to understand CRT's first decade better, but also to draw key lessons for its second. This retrieval is especially valuable because existing accounts of CRT's development as a movement tend to emphasize This chapter appeared earlier in UC Davis Law Review 33 (Summer 2000): 1377-427. the agency of individual scholars. To be sure, these individual stories are important because they map the intellectual history of a movement formed by the courageous actions ofpeople who were dissatisfied with both critical legal studies (CLS) and traditional civil-rights paradigms. We applaud such historicization ofthe movement's origins in the major CRT anthologies but hope to supplement the origin stories in the following two ways. First, we strive to demonstrate more closely the linkages between the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and student activism with the 1980s legal-intellectual movement. According to the introduction in one ofthe leading anthologies on Critical Race Theory , CRT became a "self-conscious entity" in 1989, when the first CRT workshop was convened. The editor acknowledges the intellectual influence of CLS and the political inspiration of the Civil Rights Movement and other national movements. We believe the CLS-CRT genealogy has been well developed in the popular understand- ing of CRT's origins and therefore aim in this essay to draw a closer nexus between student activism and CRT.l Second, we seek to offer a more nuanced political history ofCRT's birth that can help explain, for example, why CRT burst onto the legal academic scene at the time that it did. The other leading CRT anthology contains a detailed description ofCRT's origins in its Introduction. Like the first anthology's origin story, this description ofCRT's development notes the importance of the Civil Rights Movement for "inspiration" and "direction," as well as the CLS leftist intervention into legal discourse, as "elements in the conditions of [CRT's] possibility." The editors then identity two events central to the development of CRT as a movement-a student protest at Harvard Law School in 1981 over an alternative course on race and law, and the 1987 National Critical Legal Studies Conference on race and silence.2 The emphasis placed on the Harvard protest is suggestive and, from our perspective, very useful, but still incomplete. Why such protest emerged in 1981 and why there was a six-year gap between the two central events remain unexplained. It remains unclear how the 1981 protest played a developmental or catalytic role in CRT's rise. On the whole, therefore, genesis stories of the movement now known as Critical Race Theory are focused mostly on the scholarly writings that "formed the movement." We strive in this essay to complete the story and counter, to an extent, the "super-agency" approach to collective action that movement histories sometimes adopt.3 We attempt to ground CRT in resistance movements not to proliferate competing genesis stories but, rather, to contextualize politically CRT's birth and growth. What follows is our attempt to pursue a more politicized and multi-factored historiography in explaining the conditions of possibility behind the intellectual projects that became CRT. SUMI CHO AND ROBERT WESTLEY 33 This chapter also analyzes the cross-pollination ofmovement and theory, assessing both achievements and shortcomings. By historicizing the efforts of the initial critical -race proponents against the larger background of communal struggle, we demonstrate how antiracist practices and antiracist theorizing were metabolically intertwined. In the course of making this linkage, we credit not only the BCDP movement, but other local and national struggles that employed race-consciousness in their problem -and-goal-definition, action strategies, and organizational structure. In doing so, we also use as our point of departure insights from the recent criticalrace...

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