Call for submissions to a special issue of Communication and Democracy on Critical Race Theory. Deadline for full papers: 15 January 2025.
Guest Editors: Danielle Hodge (University of Colorado) and Karma Chávez (University of Texas).
In 1995, critical race scholar Derrick Bell asked a pointed question of the legal critics of the time: “Who’s afraid of critical race theory?” Interrogating the ways critical race theory (CRT) was reduced to a discipline of “deficiencies,” Bell articulated CRT as an epistemology concerned with the racialization of law, power, and policy that demanded a process of radical assessment. Rearticulated as the “perfect villain” (Wallace-Wells, 2021) and a “divisive concept” (Vought, 2020) twenty-five years later, CRT has since been subject to an onslaught of nationwide assaults that seek to ban its teaching and discussion in both K-12 and higher education contexts. These bans have detrimental implications for free speech, academic freedom, and the possibility for a healthy democracy as they limit what can be taught, learned, and discussed about US history, race and racism, and the contemporary political sphere. Understanding and intervening in these attacks is thus of vital importance for scholars of communication and democracy.
Consequently, in this special issue, the editors ask: Who’s STILL afraid of critical race theory? They seek a venue to respond to the persistent attacks against non-white, but specifically, African American and Black thought, bodies, and lives. Importantly, we are concerned with how these intellectual ambushes are inextricable from broader attacks on democracy that CRT helps to explain. In other words, how do we understand CRT as a sociocultural and political lightning rod that has exposed a democratic and communicative crisis?
Bell (1995) reminds us that “at a time of crisis, critics serve as reminders that we are being heard, if not always appreciated” (p. 908). Yet, in the face of so many attacks, the lack of being heard, let alone appreciated, is palpable. This special issue seeks to bring scholars together to be heard and to lay out an agenda for the relevance of CRT in the field of Communication.
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 