Remarks on "The Imperial Scholar" for "Bias in Academia" - A Panel on the Politics of Citation sponsored by the Pratt Institute Libraries
Bias in Academia
A panel discussion to expand consciousness of bias and discrimination in various academic practices and venues.
Organized by the Pratt Institute Libraries, the panelists include Janice Robertson, Ann Holder, Ric Brown, Minh-ha Pham, Mendi Obadike, Denisse Andrade, and Arlene Keizer and co-moderators Caitlin Cahill and Uzma Z. Rizvi.
This event is open to the Pratt community.
LOCATION: Alumni Reading Room, Pratt Library, 3rd Floor, Brooklyn Campus
DATE: September 12, 2018 at 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
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[[[Portions in brackets were not spoken due to time constraints]]]
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The sponsors and location of this panel have some significance to me since in the years before I became an academic, I was a legal reference librarian at a large firm in the City. It was during that time that many of the works of Critical Race Theory began to appear in the law reviews. So I had the luxury of easy access to the journals and read a fair amount over the 11 years I was a law librarian.
So it is because of this duel perspective that I want to stay fairly close to the texts that the organizers shared with us in preparation for today, particularly Delgado’s “Imperial Scholar” and also a later article that he wrote in response to the reaction.
I want to focus on these texts because they situate CRT in relation to a discussion of a politics of citation; because they expose issues that might otherwise be left aside or submerged in the desire to correct wrongs or to “make a difference” (and I use that phrase with all of its connotations in relation to CRT.
For Delgado, the context of Critical Race Theory lays within the bounds of the Law and problems within legal theory, particularly
“the exclusion of minority writing about key issues of race law…. [causing] “...blunting, skewings, and omissions in the literature dealing with race, racism, and American law.”Delgado makes a demand for recognition and inclusion that I will return to in a moment
[[[but it is worth noting that at the time of his article, he counts the number of minority law professors at 233 out of the ABA’s 3,875 FT law professors.]]]
Ten years later, Delgado reflects on citation and the privilege to speak in the 1992 article “The Imperial Scholar Revisited,” which, like the first was originally published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review (140 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1349). After a decade, Delgado finds that the important question has become “What happens when a group of insurgent scholars gains admission, gets inside the door, earns the credibility and credentials that warrant consideration by mainstream scholars?” (401)
His survey of this new terrain is subdued rather than triumphant.
[[[The inner circle of white legal scholars who had previously dominated the discussion of civil rights had now largely abandoned the field.]]]
Despite new voices and citations of new authorities, Delgado confronts what he calls a “melancholy truth”:
We take seriously new social thought only after hearing it so often that its tenets and themes begin to seem familiar, inevitable, and true. We then adopt the new paradigm, and the process repeats itself. We escape from one mental and intellectual prison only into a larger, slightly more expansive one….[[[We reject new thought until, eventually, it proponents are ‘elder states-persons,’ to be feared no longer”]]] (1992:407).
Should we be surprised by this given that CRT’s criticism never approached the level of a real critique of Justice and the system of Law [[[(by which I mean the discourses, techniques, bureaucracies)]]]? Now, CRT did offer fundamental challenges to legal theory, [[[court rules and procedures]]] and certainly gained the attention of academics in other fields. But, one can not separate CRT from its own constant references to the Law. It is all there in the footnotes, after all. CRT was deeply reformist in its demands for a fairer system and a better administration of justice.
At the same time we hardly need another “race theory” or “theory of race” with all of the historical/scientific references those phrases carry. As with the Law, CRT offered no real critique of “race theory”. Instead, its authorities often either naively or strategically Naturalize racial categories; making little or no reference to the work that has critiqued the scientific ideologies of race and racialism. But this is what one might expect of articles in elite law reviews.
So if CRT offered neither a critique of Law & Justice, nor a critique of race and racialism, then what did it offer? Nothing less than the demand for recognition and inclusion. Derrick Bell’s neo-conservatism, [[[and I dare say, his neo-segregationism,]]] is in some respects a reaction to the disappointing spoils of recognition [[[at the cost of am implicit acceptance of the system of Law and the administration of justice and punishment… maybe even with a dash of resentment and vengeance]]]. The replacement of one court by another, of one set of gatekeepers of a discipline by another set, of one Master with another, would go on, and so too would the constant assertion of privilege and of the right to judge, reward, and punish. When Audre Lorde asserted that one can not “Dismantle the Master’s House with the Master’s tools” she was in part responding to a very old and deeply ambiguous question that could be put to CRT:
“What are ye but the master’s tools?”
[[[A question also asked but answered in different ways by Aristotle, Jesus, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and every Slaver and slaver driver in the old South.]]]
Delgado’s “melancholy truth” suggests that if we want engage in a politics of citation, it may require either a compromise with the status quo, or a conscious sacrifice of status/privileges/reputation in order to undertake studies that are not mainstream, that probably will not be published in the recognized journals or by the best publishers, and that do not simply reproduce the established discourses. In other words, work that is “Untimely”. It is a matter of asking what is studied, why it is studied, and to what use, if any, one wants the work to be put. Of course, this would mean that search and tenure committees be guided by the same principles.
Let me just come back to where I began. In the second paragraph of the “Imperial Scholar,” Delgado mentions his assistant as having done most of the research for the article. At no point do we find out the name of this research assistant, nor are they actually thanked. Neither is the reference librarian who undoubtedly guided the research assistant in using the early Lexis database.
Delgado’s “Imperial Scholar” can take on many meanings and appear in many forms, even cloaked in the passion and rhetoric of an “Insurgent,” a “Nationalist,” or a “de-colonialist.”
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