In November 1997, the Critical Race Theory (CRT) conference at Yale University celebrated its 10th anniversary. One outcome ushering in the second decade of this intellectual and activist project is Crossroads, Directions, and a New Critical Race Theory, a set of revised and updated working papers, which collectively reflect a shift in focus emphasizing “multiple and interlocking forms of discrimination.” No longer outsiders, legal scholars of color insisting on the centrality of race as a theoretical and empirical point of departure in legal studies are no longer either burdened by the schizophrenia of the eighties or distracted by critiques of essentialism. As the “on-going public struggle over knowledge —its production and its dissemination” (p. 5)—remains a challenge inside and outside of legal culture, insights from the CRT project remain significant for all those who work in the academy “fighting battles in the trenches of interpretation” (p. 25).

Social science professors who recognize the importance of teaching students that every body is raced, sexed, gendered, classed, and positioned by nationality, citizenship, and residency will find this compilation, with its clarity, a useful resource when designing or revising syllabi. Divided into three parts, “History,” “Crossroads,” and “Directions,” this volume can be incorporated into undergraduate anthropology courses offering students a broader context within which to (re)consider traditional concepts in the discipline. In particular, the three subsections in “Crossroads,”called “Race,” “Narrativity,” and “Globalization,” provide thought-provoking readings for inclusion on syllabi that are attentive to theories of culture, interpretive anthropology, theoretical pluralism, and multisited ethnographic research.

Cumulatively, the contributions to Crossroads evidence a refinement of analytic models that pave a theoretical track toward “antisubordinationist social transformation” —a recurring phrase in the volume encapsulating the idea that theory cannot be divorced from activism. For professors in departments of anthropology, a discipline burdened by the double legacy of racism and humanism, the essays offer an opportunity to engage with the ongoing issue of diversity in three identified primary spheres: faculty, students, and curriculum (p. 34). Those seeking to cultivate student appreciation for the historical contexts, cultural values, and legal principles that shape representations of groups, social identities, and theories of culture will find a rich array of articles from which to choose for both introductory and advanced courses.

From Devon W. Carbado to Eric Yamamoto, each scholar challenges narrow categories and emphasizes sites along multiple axes in which individuals can be simultaneously the targets of discrimination and beneficiaries of privilege. Moving beyond reductive social constructionism, critical race theorists accentuate “multiple axes of identity and position.” This reworking of W. E. B. Du Bois’s “double consciousness” has also been articulated as a foundational concept by anthropologists of color as “multiple subjectivity” and by critical race legal feminists as “multiple consciousness” and “intersectionality.”

For departments of anthropology with few students of color, fewer faculty of color, and meager representation of anthropologists of color in required core courses, the works in Crossroads document and denaturalize discrimination and racism through substantive analyses of race, privilege, and power in the areas of disability, gender, immigration policies, and socioeconomic class hierarchies at the national and global levels. Those who seriously engage with the project of Critical Race Theory in legal studies and advocate its adaptation in other academic arenas will be challenged to ignore the ideological assaults from the right, which now includes “multicultural conservatives” as well as “the virtual lunch counter,” manifested by a color-blind discourse, “the rationalization for racial power in which few are served and many are denied” (p. 26).

This backlash still manifests itself in the academy through a strategic insistence on activating a mechanism of democracy in which invoking academic freedom serves to veto inclusive curricular revisions and to silence the “minority.” Readers should not expect to find explicit remedial prescriptions for antidiscriminatory policies as they work their way through the 19 incisive analyses of racism, sexism, nativism, and other isms. But this is not necessarily a weakness—on the contrary, the strength of the volume lies in the project itself: “CRT’s challenge to historic arrangements, liberal curatives, and backlash politics has addressed not only the practices of far-away courts and mighty corporations but also the very make-up of our own profession” (p. 4). In this context, the readings will prove empowering for those faculty and students still isolated in the monochromatic complexion of departments and majors where whiteness remains an unmarked default.

Preceded by Charles Lawrence III’s foreword, a reminder of the difficulty of challenging hierarchy and subordination in the absence of strong student activism, Crossroads concludes with an afterword by Derrick Bell, who instructively notes that although “academic faculties either ban us from their midst entirely or ensure that our numbers do not exceed one or two ... readers who hail our work may not be powerful but they do exist”. For anthropologists, this should inspire efforts to resume a leading, rather than lagging, role in revealing and revoking social sanctions that have enabled discriminatory practices to go underground or to be protected under the shield of various freedoms that the academy’s gatekeepers energetically advocate when faced with objections to their authority. Those at the vanguard of this struggle may be inspired by Derrick Bell’s observation that, although racism may be permanent, collections like Crossroads represent a mission and a contribution against “the multiple permutations of racism and their intersection with other virulent forces of oppression” (p. 412); these are the struggles that make life meaningful.