Critical Race Theory

Abstract

Critical race theory refers to a historical and contemporary body of scholarship that aims to analyze how race and racism are foundational elements in historical and contemporary social structures and social experiences, and how they change conditions of racial injustice. In defining critical race theory, it is important to make a distinction between the deep historical tradition of critical theorizing about race and racism and a specific body of US legal scholarship that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s in response to the successes and failures of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. While this new school of legal thought coined the phrase “critical race theory” to signal a new critical analysis of the role of the law in propagating and maintaining racism, this movement is part of a broader intellectual tradition of critical theories of race and antiracist struggle. Using this broader framework, critical race theory can be viewed as a diagnostic body of intellectual activism , scholarship that seeks to identify the pressure points for antiracist struggle. Given the historical scope of critical race theories, this entry highlights several core themes that tie together this eclectic body of explicitly political theorizing and concludes with an overview of contemporary political opposition to critical race theory.