Critical Race Theory

•What do you think that Crooks contributes to the plot? What about to character development?

•Is Crooks’s isolation any different from the type of loneliness that is experienced by the male workers? What about by Curley’s wife?

•How is the ranch a microcosm of American racism? How is such microcosm made manifest through the distribution of space?

•What does Slim represent within Crooks’s worldview?

•How does the term ‘right(s)’ function in Crook’s discourse?

•How do power relations operate in Chapter 4? How is the conflict influenced by institutionalized racism?

•How do sexism and racism both interlock and compete against one another in the novel?

•What sort of racial myths and stereotypes are construed in the text?

•Because Crooks is the only black character in the novel, to what extent could he be regarded as a universal symbol of blackness in America?

•Race: biologically speaking, it refers to a series of physical and genetic traits that group people into a certain type. Culturally speaking, it classifies groups of people whose language, history and traditions define them. In racist ideology, race is employed as a cultural construct.

•White supremacy: racist, ideological premises that claims that white people are superior (usually intellectually) to other races and ethnicities – a belief that is materialized through the dynamics of different public institutions in which white people are the dominant group in terms of number and higher positions.

•Institutionalized racism: forms of racism deeply ingrained in the civil, social and political structures of a nation or culture, or practiced at more informal social groupings and levels. It involves discriminatory action against certain ethnic or racial groups, either openly or through more implicit manners. Statistics evince the existence of institutionalized racism when presenting evidence with very different levels and results for different races concerning sociopolitical and legal aspects such as wealth, educational opportunities, employment, type of employment, criminal justice, common law, housing, political power and empowerment, and medical and health care.

•Scientific racism: allegedly empirical research of a pseudo anthropological and cranometric nature that proves that some races are superior to others and therefore aims to justify and perpetuate racial discrimination. Today it is no longer credible for the scientific community.

•Racial stereotypes and myths: cultural caricatures, distortions, exaggerations, deformations and misrepresentations of racial and ethnic groups. Within a racist discourse, these stereotypes and myths seep deep within the established ideology, furthering the justification of types of racial domination which in practice lead to imperialism, colonialism and white supremacy.

•Post-truth: cultural and sociopolitical phenomenon whereupon facts and evidence are deemed as secondary matters to emotional, demagogic and populist appeal.

•Racial segregation: actual spatial and material separation of different groups of people on the basis of racial difference in order to avoid any sort of miscegenation and to sustain racially supremacist ideologies and policies. It is marked by the color line, the hierarchical division of races at both a physical and a psychological level.

•Color-blindness: post Civil Rights Movement sociological phenomenon whereupon a given society, culture or group deliberately and intentionally ignores racial difference and aims at a race-neutral color. As such, racial difference is usually overlooked as the object of discussion, with the intention of promoting racial equality at all levels.

-Veil: W.E.B. DuBois’s most lasting symbol in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). The veil is a psychological and emotional boundary that impedes white people from perceiving African Americans as fully humans, and it also prevents blacks from seeing themselves as they are, and not through the racist lens of white supremacy. DuBois suggests that black individuals are not conscious of the existence of the veil – and its influence upon their lives – until after childhood, when the subject becomes conscious of the impact of segregation.

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