[box class=”grey_box”]Prepared by Deanna Hill[/box]
Critical Race Theory (CRT) emerged in the legal academy in response to growing dissatisfaction with Critical Legal Studies (CLS) and its inability to adequately address race and racism in its critique of U.S. jurisprudence. Many trace the framework back to the work of Derrick Bell in the 1960s and Alan Freeman and Richard Delgado in the 1970s and 1980s. The first CRT workshop was held at a monastery in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1989. The University of Iowa College of Law hosted the “CRT 20: Honoring Our Past, Charting Our Future” workshop in April, 2009.
CRT places race at the center of analysis. At the same time, CRT recognizes the complex ways that race intersects with ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other systems of power. CRT has an activist agenda to transform and redeem, not just to critique and deconstruct. Further, CRT works toward the elimination of racial oppression as part of the larger goal of eliminating all forms of oppression.
CRT produced several offshoots, including Critical Race Feminism, Queer-Crit, Lat-Crit, Asian Crit, TribalCrit, and Critical White Studies. Additionally, CRT crossed over into other disciplines. CRT was formally introduced into education in 1995 when Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate published in Teachers College Record the now seminal article “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education.”