Critical Race Theory

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Siobhan Somerville is a professor at the University of Illinois who wrote one of two main papers that were used for comparative analysis. The other paper was written by an associate professor by the name of Adele Morrison. The two papers used for comparison are called “Scientific racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body” and “It’s [NOT] a Black Thing: The Black/Gay Split over same-sex marriage- A critical [race] Perspective”. Somerville points out that the “natural” heterosexuality way for human beings has been a very recent invention in the Western Culture. (243) He focuses on racial ideologies and his key point is understanding and relationships between medical and scientific speech of sexuality and scientific racism. He also uses…show more content…
Scientific racism is the use of scientific techniques and hypotheses to support or justify the belief in racism, racial inferiority, or racial superiority, or the practice of classifying individuals of different phenotypes into discrete races. Critical Race Theory is an academic discipline focused on the application of critical theory, a critical examination of society and culture, to the intersection of race, law, and power. Critical race theory is often associated with many of the controversial issues related to race and…show more content…
(Morrison,17) The idea of religion also comes up in both articles. In Somerville’s article he talks about the idea of polygeny where different races descended from different biological and geographical sources. Whereas in Morrison’s he talks about how people of colour are very religious, whereas people who consider themselves LGBT are not as religious. Therefore two important questions are brought up, “Should a laws validity be determined by religious belief or doctrine” and “should one who holds a particular religious belief or member of a community of faith hold another to their standards when the other individual does not adhere to the same belief?” (27) Morrison believes that because each question relates to the religion and not to race or sexual orientation, the questions are immaterial to the issue of the Black/gay split. Lastly both Authors bring up the idea of “mixing races”. Somerville describes that couples who consist of black and white have invert offspring and with invert characteristics. Morrison also speaks of the idea that blacks cannot marry whites because blacks are the subordinated group and will give their
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