Law reforms in the US, ostensibly enacted to prohibit racism, have proven ineffective because they focus on bad intentions of individuals and fail to comprehend population-level conditions.
Critical Race Theory offers a critique of how law and certain law reform strategies misunderstand the actual operation of life-shortening state violence, and how that has produced a set of reforms that fail to actually transform material conditions of white supremacy. These critiques redirect our attention to the conditions we aim to transform.
Legal reform has significant dangers: changing only the window-dressing of harmful systems but leaving the violence of the systems in tact, failing to provide actual relief for those facing the worst conditions, and legitimizing or expanding systems of harm.
We must experiment, fail, and try again, but beginning with a critique of legal reform and a commitment to center the most vulnerable moves us away from some of the most common, obvious pitfalls of neoliberal social movement strategies.
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