LJU4801_PORTFOLIO

LEGAL PHILOSOPHY (LJU4801) - FINAL PORTFOLIO ASSIGNMENT 3 QUESTION 1 Critical Race Theory (CRT) is based on approaches; skeptical approach that inculcates white privilege and prevalence of hierarchy as the dominant form of social organisation; race consciousness which views law as not being colour-blind; the role of power, interpretive turn and intersectionality which looks at the role of storytelling and identity politics which views race as a social construct which is not natural or biological but something humans create. Modiri’s approach, fits very well into the ways in which critical theory generally, and CRT in particular, look at the problem of race. Modiri asserts that there is a false consciousness that people have escaped the perceived shackles of race, however, the advent of constitutional democracy in South Africa has left white supremacy and coloniality largely undisturbed.1 Constitutional democracy rests on compromised political foundations and has in the final analysis failed to disrupt the historical dynamics and afterlives of colonial conquest. On race consciousness and the role of power Modiri asserts that what has changed is the physiognomy of white power, which allows a white minority to maintain its hegemony under the guise of non-racialism,2 while simultaneously placing Black people at the nadir of the social hierarchy and binding them into perpetual inferiority and powerlessness