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A best practice is structurally a facially neutral rule, and Critical Race Theory supplies two disciplined instruments for auditing what such a rule quietly encodes.
Published: 2026-09-21
Author: Adam DJ Brett
Series: Why Theory? (DPPR 916)
Tags: critical race theory, best practice, method, counter-storytelling, law
Source: DPPR 916, Why Theory Unit 11: Critical Race Theory
Sorting practices into categories is never neutral transcription. The categories decide what counts as a practice, as evidence, as excellent, whether or not anyone notices. I will argue that a best practice is, structurally, a facially neutral rule, and I will show it by running two Critical Race Theory instruments, interest convergence and counter-storytelling, across an ordinary hiring rubric. These are analytic capacities, not positions.
CRT has a genealogy worth getting right. It emerged in American legal scholarship across the mid-1970s and 1980s among Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris, and others. They noticed that the gains of the civil rights era had stalled while the law on the books looked more egalitarian than ever. That gap is the founding puzzle. The movement drew on critical legal studies and broke with it over how little it said about race; it named itself at a workshop in Wisconsin in 1989.
The central claim gets garbled in summary, so state it carefully. CRT scholars hold that racism is not principally an aberration, a matter of bad actors violating a sound system, but an ordinary structural feature of institutions, what Delgado and Stefancic call the usual way society does business. The sharper version is what matters here: structural disadvantage is often reproduced by rules that announce no racial purpose at all. The rule applies to everyone identically and still distributes outcomes unevenly, because it was built on a baseline that already reflected who held what. Harris pressed furthest in "Whiteness as Property" (1993), where American law treats whiteness as an expectation with the characteristics of property.
In 1980 Bell published a comment on Brown v. Board of Education proposing the interest-convergence dilemma. Moral progress alone does not explain the desegregation ruling; it becomes intelligible once you notice that Black Americans' interest in desegregation converged, at that moment, with the interests of white elites, including the Cold War standing of the United States. If progress arrives when interests converge, it recedes when they diverge. Interest convergence hands you a question to put to any reform: whose interest did this also serve, and what happens when that alignment ends?
Counter-storytelling is the second instrument. Every institution runs on stories it tells about itself: how it began, why its standards are right, who succeeds and why. Delgado and Stefancic name the alternative a counterstory, narrative from those written out of the official account. Solórzano and Yosso formalized it as research methodology; Martinez has given it a craft. Treated rigorously, a counterstory is grounded in real experience and in the scholarly record, transparent about how it was assembled, and testable against the majoritarian account. It is evidence, and it carries evidence's obligations, including answerability to the people it draws on. Crenshaw's intersectionality (1989, and "Mapping the Margins," 1991) began the same way, as a precise account of how a single-axis rule fails the plaintiff harmed where two axes meet.
Picture an organization proud of its hiring rubric. Applied identically to everyone, it weights three things: a degree from an accredited program, five years of continuous full-time experience, two references from inside the profession. It never mentions race. Run interest convergence: ask when it was adopted and whose problem it solved. Often the honest answer is that it defended the organization against inconsistency and legal exposure, a real interest, with the fairness benefit riding along, which tells you what happens when the two come apart. Then run counter-storytelling: ask a candidate the rubric screened out to narrate the path she actually took, the career interrupted by caregiving, the community credential no accreditor recognizes, the professional network nobody in her family could open. The rubric did not decide against her. It simply never had a category for her.
CRT is genuinely contested, and saying so is part of the scholarly job. Randall Kennedy challenged its claims about narrative and standpoint in 1989 and Delgado replied; since 2020 the term has circulated far more loosely than these scholars use it. Read the primary arguments, represent them accurately, and keep asking the question the diagnostic exists to raise, of your own standards first. Whose knowledge counts?
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