African American critical theory attempts to address the essentialized representations of the “other”  in dominant writing. The theory aims to expose the stereotypes, and how representations reify cultural understanding and thinking. African American critical theory tries to recover excluded and marginalized works by those outside the dominant hegemony. African American critics try to integrate their work into a larger historical and cultural understanding that contains many silenced voices subversive to the hegemony. The critics constantly celebrate marginalized identities as valuable, valid and equal. They work to deconstruct the binary hierarchy. They believe that racialism is a belief in racial superiority and purity. They believe that the  unequal power relations that result discriminatory practices in society are a direct result of racism. Incorporation of racist policies and practices in the institutions by which society operates leads to institutionalized racism, Theorist concentrate on the ideal of the double-consciousness. A double-consciousness is the 2 conflicting cultures, African American and European. Critical Race theory looks at exposing systemic and the underground racism in practice. Henry Gates Jr focuses on lore of the trickster and repetition of vernacular styles to develop African American aesthetics and literary strategies. Kimberle Williams Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality that describes that the identity is a product of multiple attributes.