Randall Kennedy

freedom of speech, freedom to learn, freedom to listen, freedom to read.

That's terrible.

And it's one of the most frightening things that has happened in American life in recent memory.

So that's the first thing I want to say about so-called critical race theory.

Now, now I'll say something.

I'm going to take the quotation marks off of the term critical race theory.

Critical race theory is a sort of a

you could have a nice conversation about actually what it is.

One way of viewing it is to say that, well, critical race theory is a community of ideas that comes from a community of people.

The community of people would be people in legal academia in the...

you know, the period 1908, starting in probably the middle of the 1980s.

It would be associated with people like Derrick Bell.

It would be associated with people like Kimberly Crenshaw, people like Charles Lawrence, people like Richard Delgado, people like Mary Matsuda.

And these are folks who held a

They embraced a couple of – they articulated a couple of propositions.

One of their propositions was that liberal race policy was insufficient.

They would say that the racial policies of a person like my old boss, Thurgood Marshall, the liberal racial policies were insufficient to grapple fully with the pervasiveness and the depth and intensity of American racism.

Their basic claim, and I think, by the way, it was a good claim.

Their basic claim was that American racism is more central, more deeply embedded in American life than most people perceived, including liberals.

And I think there was a lot of strength to that proposition.