
Education Week describes the core of CRT as the idea that race is a social construct and racism is neither an individual bias nor prejudice-it is "embedded in the legal system" and supplemented with policies and procedures. Brooks defined critical race theory in 1994 as "a collection of critical stances against the existing legal order from a race-based point of view". In his introduction to the comprehensive 1995 publication of critical race theory's key writings, Cornel West describes CRT as "an intellectual movement that is both particular to our postmodern (and conservative) times and part of a long tradition of human resistance and liberation." In 2021, Khiara Bridges, a law professor and author of the textbook, Critical Race Theory: A Primer, defined critical race theory as an "intellectual movement"-a "body of scholarship", and an "analytical toolset for interrogating the relationship between law and racial inequality." These lawmakers have been accused of misrepresenting the tenets and importance of CRT and of having the goal of broadly silencing discussions of racism, equality, social justice, and the history of race. lawmakers have sought to ban or restrict the instruction of CRT along with other anti‑racism education in primary and secondary schools. In the 21st century, CRT has generated some political controversies. Īcademic critics of CRT argue that it is based on storytelling instead of evidence and reason, rejects the concepts of truth and merit, and opposes liberalism. A key CRT concept is intersectionality, which emphasizes that race can combine with other identities (such as gender and class) to produce complex combinations of power and advantage. In the field of legal studies, CRT emphasizes that formally color-blind laws can still have racially discriminatory outcomes. Scholars of CRT view race as a social construct that is not "biologically grounded and natural" and that race as a construct advances the interests of white people at the expense of people of color. DuBois, as well as the Black Power, Chicano, and radical feminist movements from the 1960s and 1970s. CRT draws from thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and W. With racism persisting even after civil rights laws were passed, CRT emerged as a movement by the 1980s, reworking theories of critical legal studies (CLS) with more focus on race. Lawrence III, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia J. ĬRT is a framework of analysis grounded in critical theory which originated in the mid-1970s in the writings of several American legal scholars, including Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Cheryl Harris, Charles R. One tenet of CRT in the current multidisciplinary and international form, is that racism and disparate racial outcomes are the result of complex, changing, and often subtle social and institutional dynamics, rather than explicit and intentional prejudices of individuals. They examined social, cultural, and legal issues primarily as they relate to race and racism in the United States.

In its earliest iteration, these scholars focused on exposing how the alleged liberal notion of value-neutral law had a significant political role in maintaining a racially unjust social order.

Academic movement regarding society, race and culture in the United StatesĬritical race theory ( CRT) is a cross-disciplinary international intellectual movement and a body of specialized scholarship, that originated with American legal scholars in the post-civil rights era as 1960s landmark civil rights laws were being eroded and schools were being re-segregated.
