Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory

The Lion Refugee in Europe: A Critical Race/Anti-Blackness Counterstory

“…A major tenet of CRT is the use of counterstories to challenge the white majoritarian story of continued racial progress in the Western European and U.S. liberal state (Goldberg, 2006). CRT initial scholars such as Bell (1992), Matsuda (1996) in law, Solórzano and Yosso (2002), Delgado Bernal (2002), Yosso (2006), Peréz-Huber and Munóz (2021), Cook and Dixson (2013) and Martinez (2020) in writing and rhetoric studies have argued for the importance of counterstories that push back against the myths of racial progress narratives. Instead, the counterstories in CRT serve as a racialized reality check regarding how and what racial minorities endure as they are never really seen as European or always have socially constructed foreigner status.…”

“…As a form of oppositional scholarship, CRT challenges the experience of White European Americans as the normative standard. Rather, CRT grounds its conceptual framework in the distinctive contextual experiences of people of color and racial oppression, using literary narrative knowledge and storytelling to challenge the existing social construction of race (Martinez, 2020).…”

“…The voices of Black people, African Americans, and other specific groups of color through the counterstories are important to present in fiction or literary essays as a methodological form of scholarly research so others, particularly white Europeans and Americans can see and feel the ways the law and other aspects of institutionalized racism had been used to disempower racially marginalized groups. Counterstory works through an application of CRT to qualitative research methods, or CRT as a research methodology (Martinez, 2020). Delgado (1989) called for the legitimacy of counterstorytelling of discrimination that sought to disrupt the established story of assumed racial progress.…”

Guest editorial: You can't racelight CRT!

“…schools, healthcare, employment, housing) that profoundly influence the socio-psychological and material realities of marginalized groups, including African Americans, Latinx, Native Americans and Asian Americans, thereby spotlighting the systemic nature of oppression and its multifaceted impacts (Ray, 2022). Pioneering CRT scholars in the legal field innovatively employed dialogue, narratives, chronicles and personal testimonies in their scholarship, recognizing that individuals from marginalized communities, owing to their distinct societal positioning, narrate experiences of racialized oppression that starkly contrast the dominant narratives of continual racial progress often portrayed by white scholars and political leaders (Delgado, 1989; Martinez, 2020). What follows are the key common threads that undergird the fundamental CRT analysis:…”

Acknowledge the land: An Indigenous historical reflection on colonial and extractive theology

“…Such a repugnant and unethical statement demands the balance of a land acknowledgement (Blackfox, 2022). In colonized places, land acknowledgement is a counterstory (Martinez, 2020) of the land. The Permian Basin, located in western Texas and southeast New Mexico, is often presumed to have one story to tell: petroleum (US Department of Energy, 2018).…”