How the critical race framework study Intersects with and departs from critical race theory?

Summary

The Critical Race Framework Study supports several central principles of Critical Race theory such as centering marginalized perspectives, practice-based change, and examining inequity reproduction. The Critical Race Framework is highly concerned about all systems of inequality, including racism and classism. However, it departs from CRT in two major ways. First, the CR Framework sees race essentialism as a barrier to these principles and criticizes CRT's underdevelopment of practical tools and theories of change. Whereas CRT seeks to indelibly center race, the CR Framework sees race as an "anachronistic hold-over" that largely developed to justify slavery. Second, the CR Framework directs attention to diversity within and across races. It assumes that there are no shared genetic, sociocultural, historical, linguistic, or religious attributes to justify the use of race in research.  On a personal note, the principal investigator of the CR Framework sees Black race essentialism as erasure of African American history and culture. These are descendants of US enslaved and Jim Crow families.

Why Critical Race Theory Should Not be Dismissed

• The application of CRT in the Critical Race Framework and Public Health Liberation theory seeks more justice and equity. Without moral grounding, the US become a hyper-capitalism society without a shared common morality (discussed in PHL Public Health Realism) or lacks adherence to scientific principles (Critical Race Framework).  While CRT may attract criticism and be unbalanced in its concern about racism over generalized explanatory models, the core basic moral pull of the CRT should not be dismissed.

• The study's goal to make research more accountable and socially responsible led to pointed criticism of racializing populations in research. Without CRT, the Critical Race Framework would have been less theoretically grounded.

• Resident leaders in public housing motivated Dr. Williams to advance public health research methodologies to serve populations in his community of practice. In other words, the centering of equity-driven practice in PhD studies elucidates the racism that CRT seeks to weaken.

• CRT's emphasis on pervasive racism and centering marginalized voices is pointing in the right moral direction. Dr. Williams has developed new theories to expand structural racism to include the public health economy - a framework that is highly inclusive of all populations affected by anarchy within social, economic, educational, community, political, judicial, and regulatory structural determinants of health. He seeks to center marginalized voices who bear the brunt of deep economic inequality, ecological devastation, and political apathy.

• The principal investigator, Dr. Christopher Williams, is a first-generation African American (ADOS) whose parents were working class, factory workers. Dr. Williams benefited from an educational system that valued diverse backgrounds and perspectives, enabling him to attain a bachelor's degree, master's degree, and PhD. Dr. Williams is rapidly redefining public health and health equity discourse through Public Health Liberation theory, the public health economy, public health realism, and the Critical Race Framework.

Excerpt from the Critical Race Framework Study

"Critical Race Theory (CRT) strongly argues for intensifying the study of race. CRT is a school of thought that promotes critical analysis of race and racism across a variety of disciplines. It assumes that racism is endemic to US society and that white supremacy perpetuates systemic racism (Crenshaw, 2015; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Stovall, 2005; West, 1995). It has its origins within Critical Legal Studies wherein purported color blindness in the law was challenged (Crenshaw, 2015; Delgado & Stefancic, 2001). CRT has been adopted in many disciplines. The mid-nineties marked its introduction in education, followed by public health research in 2010 as “Principles of Public Health Critical Race Praxis (PHCRP) (Ford et al., 2010; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). CRT posits a conceptual and methodological orientation that upholds the centrality of race (Ford et al., 2010). 

Although the CRT literature is highly context-dependent and not a theory in the traditional sense of a concretized theory of change, there are at least four generally accepted principles: race consciousness, contemporary mechanisms, centering in the margins, and praxis (Ford et al., 2010). Race consciousness seeks to centrally and contextually place race and racism discourse – whether historical, legal, educational, public health, and research (Ford et al., 2010). Contemporary mechanisms draw attention to the ways in which race and racism impact decisions and policies within these fields, heavily relying on the social context (Ford & Airhihenbuwa, 2018). Centering brings marginalized perspectives and lived experiences to the forefront of discourse and research (Ford et al., 2010). Praxis concerns the synergism of the prior principles to transform public health practice (Ford et al., 2010). 

When Ford and colleagues introduced CRT in public health research, PHCRP built upon the foundational principles of CRT: public health, centering, critical consciousness, experiential knowledge, ordinariness, praxis, primacy, race consciousness, and the social construction of minoritized populations (Ford et al., 2010). The first PHCRP-based training targeting academic researchers was published in 2018 and showed promise as a training model (Butler et al., 2018). The term Quantitative Critical Race (“QuantCrit”) theory is often used when CRT is applied in statistical data analysis and interpretation (Castillo & Gillborn, 2022). After more than twenty years of CRT, “this promise of a coherent account of race had not yet come to fruition” (Cabrera, 2019). Although its supporters understand CRT as an intellectual movement, it has attracted much criticism. Critics have argued against CRT on several fronts: does not contain the “intellectual architecture” to be considered social theory, lack of clear mechanistic racial theory, overemphasis and underdevelopment of systemic racism and white supremacy as root causes, lack of methodological translation, allows too much intellectual variety, lack of Latinx inclusion, and non-agreement among CRT adherents (Anguiano & Castañeda, 2014; Cabrera, 2019; Treviño et al., 2008). 

Based on a PubMed search conducted on November 2, 2022, for the term “PHCRP,” public health CRT remains in its formative stage, as little appears on standardized tools and trainings since the first published training conducted by Butler and colleagues (Butler et al., 2018). 

Proponents for the use of race in research have often regarded race as a proxy for several constructs – income, culture, biology, and racism (C. P. Jones, 2000; T. A. LaVeist, 2005). In Jones and colleagues’ highly cited work positing a theory on three levels of racism, they purported that race is a “rough proxy for socioeconomic status, culture, and genes, but it precisely captures the social classification of people in a race-conscious society such as the United States...That is, the variable “race” is not a biological construct that reflects innate differences, but a social construct that precisely captures the impacts of racism” (C. P. Jones, 2000). While Jones’ position is that “race is a contextual variable, not a characteristic of the person,” she acknowledges several issues with race while seeking to defend race as an indicator of “the distribution of risks and opportunities in our race-conscious society” (C. P. Jones, 2001). She presents race as without a shared cultural meaning (“There is no single Black culture, just as there is no single White, Hispanic, or Asian culture”), no genetic delineation (“There is no denying that there is genetic variability on the planet. However, the pie slicer that we call race does not capture that genetic variability”), and spatially and temporally changeable (“this assigned race may vary over time”) (C. P. Jones, 2001). Despite these major limitations, she and her colleagues’ research position can be understood as encouraging the centrality of race as a researcher’s social responsibility to acknowledge and respond to inequity in a race-conscious social context. 

Similar to Jones, Thomas LaVeist holds a complex view of race in public health research – acknowledging conceptual and methodological challenges. LaVeist’s physiognomy model of race and health of cause and effect posits three pathways for explaining racial health disparities – behavioral, cultural or ethnic, social or structural (T. A. LaVeist, 1994). He identified inherent weaknesses of race: poor proxy (“it seems logical that if race is a proxy for other factors such as biology or culture, then a need exists to find more creative ways to measure these other factors”), lack of practical translation (“Moreover, from a statistical standpoint the simple inclusion of a race dummy variable in a regression model is inadequate if the objective is to develop interventions to affect race differences in a dependent variable”), inadequate for population validity (“In practice, justified examples for using race as a criterion in sample selection are rare”), and measurement error (“there are measurement problems with race that have not been adequately addressed”)(T. A. LaVeist, 1994). LaVeist concluded that, “Researchers should treat the race variable with the same degree of caution and skepticism with which it treats any other variable” (T. A. LaVeist, 1994) The latter is the underlying premise of this study. Still, LaVeist heavily relies on the construction of race in his body of work. For example, a study compared black and white residents in Baltimore, Maryland and found that neighborhood (“place”) was misattributed to race (T. LaVeist et al., 2011). In other words, race is highly valuable for investigating health disparities despite considerable limitations. 

On the other hand, CRT critics have posited that racial nomenclature lacks: 1) conceptual definitions, 2) a viable cultural proxy or surrogate, 3) clarity into disease etiology, 4) an adequate response to within-group heterogeneity, and 5) standardization (Bhopal & Donaldson, 1998; Fullilove, 1998; Ioannidis et al., 2021; Lin & Kelsey, 2000). A recent systematic review showed poor conceptual clarity of the race variable, lack of delineation between ethnicity and race, and limited discussion of how race was measured (Martinez et al., 2022)...

Researchers have also encouraged greater focus on racial subgroups over homogeneous groups (CDC, 1998). This study does not take that position. The supra-construct of race implied in this framing remains a major problem for health disparities research, as discussed. It may be a position that is somewhat consistent with CRT because CRT encourages “deeper understandings of concepts, relationships, and personal biases” (Ford et al., 2010). However, the CRT assumption based on the primacy of race is a fundamental feature of its school of thought. In our study, we assume that race is an anachronistic hold-over that “developed largely to justify the highly profitable African slave trade and the systems of slavery in the Americas” (Fullilove, 1998). Our study premise is that the centuries-old social construction of race has devolved as to be too attenuated and crude for public health research. It weakens research quality, encourages poor practices, and retards scientific progress."