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President Donald Trump issued an executive order in September of 2020 seeking to exclude diversity and inclusion training from federal contracts if those trainings contained so-called “divisive concepts” like stereotyping and scapegoating based on race and sex. In the wake of the executive order, attacks on Critical Race Theory (CRT) skyrocketed.  However, many of these discussions have mischaracterized CRT. In this Essay, one of the participants of the original CRT workshop held in Madison, Wisconsin in the summer of 1989 provides a historical account of what CRT is and what it sought to accomplish. 

More than anything, those early CRT meetings were driven by a concern about the racial disparities in the existing socioeconomic conditions of society, despite the legal victories of the civil rights era of the 1960s. This concern was heightened by the Supreme Court. The Court’s Equal Protection jurisprudence had frozen the racial disparities in place because it increasingly adopted an approach for resolving racial discrimination along the dictates of colorblindness. Thus, not only were we critiquing racial jurisprudence based on colorblindness, but also arguing that the Equal Protection Clause jurisprudence should recognize a distinction between policies and programs directed towards attenuating racial disparities and those aimed at strengthening them. Such an approach played on the dual applications of race consciousness. The racial consciousness of slavery and segregation and articulated by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education was based on the belief that there was something wrong with Black people. We embraced a different form of race consciousness—one that was consciously aware that the racial disparities of our time were not the result of deficiencies in Black people, but the continuing manifestations of our history of racial oppression and subordination. As a result, American society and American jurisprudence needed a race consciousness dedicated to dismantling the policies, programs, and institutional practices that were recreating racial disparities.

The military is one of the most powerful institutions to define membership in the American polity. Throughout this country’s history, noncitizens, immigrants, and outsiders have been called to serve in exchange for the privileges of citizenship and recognition. At its height, the idea that service constitutes citizenship—which this Note calls “constitutive service”—successfully transformed a group of “perpetual foreigners” to “citizens.” Until 1952, individuals of Asian descent were categorically excluded from the polity, a barrier that ultimately crumbled after Asian Americans rendered a long history of military service, beginning with the War of 1812, to the Civil War, then to the two World Wars. Yet, precisely because military service is so transformative, the United States over the past decade has imposed both formal and informal restrictions barring certain groups of people from serving, among them individuals who are gay, transgender, undocumented—and to a lesser extent—women and Muslim Americans. These restrictions are reminders that the United States continue to debate who is fit to be an “American,” and therefore, an “American soldier.”

In 2044, the United States is projected to become a “majority-minority” country, with people of color making up more than half of the population. And yet in the public imagination—from Robocop to Minority Report, from Star Trek to Star Wars, from A Clockwork Orange to 1984 to Brave New World—the future is usually envisioned as majority white. What might the future look like in year 2044, when people of color make up the majority in terms of numbers, or in the ensuing years, when they also wield the majority of political and economic power? And specifically, what might policing look like? This Article attempts to answer these questions by examining how artists, cybertheorists, and speculative scholars of color—Afrofuturists and Critical Race Theorists—have imagined the future. What can we learn from Afrofuturism, the term given to “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns [in the context of] techno culture?” And what can we learn from Critical Race Theory and its “father” Derrick Bell, who famously wrote of space explorers to examine issues of race and law? What do they imagine policing to be, and what can we imagine policing to be in a brown and black world?