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Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is W.E.B. Du Bois professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He criticizes the emphasis on language in the following passage:
By progressively redefining our terms, we could always say of the economic gap between black and white America: the problem is still racism . . . and, by stipulation, it would be true.
But the grip of this vocabulary has tended to foreclose the more sophisticated and multivariate models of political economy we so desperately need. I cannot otherwise explain why some of our brightest legal minds believe that substantive liberties can be vouchsafed and substantive inequalities redressed by punishing rude remarks. Or why their analysis of racism owes more to the totalizing theory of Catharine MacKinnon than to the work of scholar-investigators like Douglas Massey or William Julius Wilson or Gary Orfield: people who, whatever their disagreements, at least attempt to find out how things work in the real world, never confusing the empirical with the merely anecdotal.
Instead, critical theory is often allowed to serve as a labor saving device. For if racism can be fully textualized, if its real existence is in its articulation, then racial inequality can be prized free from the moss and soil of political economy. . . . [R]acist speech must prove to be the real content of racial subordination: banish it, and you banish subordination.
Reference: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Critical Race Theory and the First Amendment" in Speaking of Race, Speaking of Sex, p. 56.