The second paragraph in the section “Spin-off Movements” reads: Returning to Delgado and Stefancic, we should note that they also employ distancing language when speaking of CRT’s place in fields other than education. Is “CRT in education” part of “CRT proper”? Is it, to use Delgado’s and Stefancic’s metaphor, a branch on the CRT tree? Or is “CRT in education” CRT in the sense that it’s an instance of people applying CRT proper? I’m uncertain that Bridges offers a definitive answer. Bridges devotes twenty-one pages to “Lawyers on education” and about fourteen pages to “Educators on Education.” In the latter section, Bridges speaks of educators such as Gloria Ladson-Billings as those who “have brought the insights and critiques generated by legal scholars operating within the CRT framework to the field of education” but she also speaks of this application work as “the development of CRT in the field of education.” Indeed, throughout “Educators on Education,” Bridges uses the phrases “CRT in education,” which leaves one unsure how she thinks CRT relates to education. Another introduction to CRT presents a similar take. For the entry “LatCrit (Latino-Critical) Theory” they write, “Branch of critical race theory that considers issues of concern to Latinos, such as immigration, language rights, and multi-identity.” For Delgado and Stefancic, LatCrit is a branch of CRT Critical Race Theory in education isn’t, though it applies CRT insights that come from CRT’s branches. Another glossary entry makes this clear, too. The only clear case I’ve found comes about one-hundred pages later-in a glossary! For the entry “Education, Critical Race Theory In,” Delgado and Stefancic write: “Scholarly movement that applies critical race theory to issues in the field of education, including high-stakes testing, affirmative action, hierarchy in schools, tracking and school discipline, bilingual and multicultural education, and the debate over ethnic studies and the Western Canon.” Delgado and Stefancic again have used rhetoric that distances CRT in education from what they deem to be CRT proper. Moreover, they hardly mention them again in the rest of their Introduction. Note that Delgado and Stefancic use rhetoric that’s fails to unequivocally deem these spin-off movements CRT. The last quotation is striking and instructive. Today, many scholars in the field of education consider themselves critical race theorists who use CRT’s ideas…” As Valdes et al observe, “CRT is crossing both national and disciplinary boundaries, as scholars from other disciplines and countries begin more and more actively to engage our accumulated record.” Likewise, Curry writes, “Critical Race Theory has not only exceeded the limitations of law, but achieved a transdisciplinary reach whose conceptualizations and configurations of American racism influence scholarship in sociology, history, and education.” And Delgado and Stefancic, when discussing what they call “spin-off movements” from CRT, explain that “although CRT began as a movement in law, it has rapidly spread beyond that discipline. But, like CRT theorists including Richard Delgado, Jean Stefancic, Tommy Curry, and Francisco Valdes et al., I also affirm that scholars and activists have brought CRT into disciplines and domains that are beyond law or legal studies. I hold that CRT in its historically original and proper sense is a legal movement aimed at understanding, resisting, and remediating how US law and legal institutions such as law schools have fostered and perpetuated racism and white supremacy before and after Brown v.
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Hence, as we’ll see, it isn’t easy to identify the central tenets of “CRT.” As one of CRT’s founders Kimberlé Crenshaw wrote, “the notion of CRT as a fully unified school of thought remains a fantasy of our critics.” Diversity of belief, method, and concerns among the things that, in one sense or another, are CRT has markedly increased the past twenty-one years. This was true back in 1999, when the CRT movement was but ten-years old. There is an enormous variety of opinion under the CRT banner. Inevitably, I disappoint these inquirers. Since I work on CRT, they’re hoping I can catch them up to speed.
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And for most, CRT is something they’ve just started hearing about.
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Lately, many people are asking me the same question: “What are the main tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT)?”įor most, their interest in CRT arises from recent civic and ecclesiastical condemnations of/ divisions over it.
#Critical race theory tenets whiteness as series
This is the first meditation of a multipart series considering different proposals of what constitutes Critical Race Theory’s common themes (or, for some, central tenets).